Hacker Cinema
An Open Secret
2014 · Film · documentary · 99 min
Directed by Amy J. Berg
An investigation into accusations of teenagers being sexually abused within the film industry.
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
Where to watch
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9 comments on Hacker News
Then please give him all of your money, if that's the kind of person you are and support! It's pretty creepy how you're so gullibly enthusiastic and easily convinced to help out a notorious accused pedophile crypto scammer fraud, though. But you be you!
alexnewman: I understand how Nigerian Letter Scam frauds purposefully put grammatical mistakes and misspellings into their letters to filter out non-idiotic people who are no so gullible that they can spell and write complete sentences, but what is it exactly about that article about Brock Pierce that impressed and appealed to you so much, that it convinced you to help him out and publicly declare your support for him? Or did you already know about his well-documented history, which the article omitted, but I'll gladly give you a few quotes and links to here in case you or other potential suckers didn't already know all about him?
#BrockPierce from @AnOpenSecret on #LastWeekTonight with John Oliver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TAnAYa8gas
John Oliver called out Brock Pierce as a "douche" and a "Sleepy Creepy Cowboy From The Future" as well as recommending you all Google: Brock Pierce Scandal. We at @AnOpenSecret are very familiar with Brock as a founder of the Digital Entertainment Network AKA DEN mentioned in our documentary where pedophilia took place.
D.E.N. OF INIQUITY ; CHAIRMAN’S EXIT FOLLOWS PEDO SUIT
https://nypost.com/1999/11/03/d-e-n-of-iniquity-chairmans-exit-follows-pedo-suit/
>The chairman and co-founder of the red-hot Internet start-up Digital Entertainment Network resigned after settling a lawsuit alleging he sexually abused a 13-year-old boy.
Brock Pierce's the Pedophile EXPOSED
https://telegra.ph/Brock-Pierces-the-Pedophile-EXPOSED-07-07
>“The Last Pixel Show” ZDNet article by Mike Ryan about the collapse of DEN, the sexual abuse allegations against the founders, and the mystery of their whereabouts. This is one of the first press mentions of the rape lawsuit made against Brock Pierce which he claimed to be “unaware” of for several years.
The Last Pixel Show
http://web.archive.org/web/20081011080108/http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/The-Last-Pixel-Show/0,139023166,120106761-1,00.htm
>As fate would have it, Collins-Rector was served with the papers only days before the IPO plans were made public. Though he and DEN announced several weeks later that the lawsuit had been settled out of court, the IPO was canceled, and not long afterward Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce left DEN. This being the dot-com world, DEN for a while managed to survive even this disaster. For one thing, the employees seemed to take it in stride when the head of their company -- a company that catered to a young audience -- was branded as an alleged pedophile. A board member made it clear that management, too, was unconcerned, more interested in money than in morals. Marc Nathanson, who sat on DEN's board of directors, told the Los Angeles Times: "Who people date is none of the board's business."
Tether Co-Founder Brock Pierce Visited Jeffery Epstein’s Private Island • ProCoinNews.com
https://procoinnews.com/tether-co-founder-brock-pierce-visited-jeffery-epsteins-private-island/
>Tether’s co-founder Brock Pierce has some major explaining to do.
Some in Bitcoin group resign over new board member’s link to sex abuse
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/some-in-bitcoin-group-resign-over-new-board-member%E2%80%99s-link-to-sex-abuse.1244123/
Hollywood’s Underage Sexual Abuse Problem: 5 Shocking Injustices From ‘An Open Secret’
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/hollywoods-underage-sexual-abuse-problem-5-shocking-injustices-from-an-open-secret-1201891024/
>“Pedophile ring” DEN was founded by an abuser, his former victim, and a well-known child actor
>Brock Pierce, a frequent Villard subject who appeared in “The Mighty Ducks” films, was introduced to Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley by “The Usual Suspects” director Bryan Singer. Collins-Rector and Shackley met in a chatroom, began dating, and moved in together when Shackley was 15 and Collins-Rector was 31. After starting an internet service provider, they recruited Pierce to form the Digital Entertainment Network, a 1998 precursor to modern streaming platforms. DEN provided original content starring child actors. Prior to the company’s planned $75 million IPO, the trio was hit with sexual abuse allegations and a lawsuit filed by a New Jersey who’d worked for Collins-Rector. With an investigation underway, they fled the U.S.; Interpol arrested them in Spain in 2002. Collins-Rector spent 18 months imprisoned prior to extradition, then plead guilty to nine counts of child sexual abuse. He was soon released, and after registering as a convicted sex offender, he ran away to London.
The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire
https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/
>I was in the business myself at the time, selling items in the classic MMO Ultima Online. After the conference, I blogged “Brock Pierce looks like a Norman Rockwell 13-year-old, talks like a coked-up 35-year-old, and happens to have turned 23 last Friday. He is either my new best friend or my new worst nightmare.” What alarmed me was the news that IGE was planning to move beyond EverQuest to other games—including Ultima. “I haven’t even had a chance to get my little five-and-dime up and running,” I lamented, “and already the Wal-Mart is coming to town.”
Digital Entertainment Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
>DEN was slated for a $75 million USD IPO in October 1999 but the IPO was withdrawn[11] in the wake of allegations of sexual assault against Collins-Rector, Shackley, and fellow executive Brock Pierce. All three executives subsequently resigned.[2] Layoffs followed in February 2000.[12] While a new executive team led by former Capitol Records President Gary Gersh[11] and former Microsoft executive Greg Carpenter[13] tried to salvage the company and relaunch in May 2000,[14] DEN filed for bankruptcy and shut down in June 2000.[15][16]
The Strange Saga of Jeffrey Epstein’s Link to a Child Star Turned Cryptocurrency Mogul
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/strange-saga-jeffrey-epstein-s-link-brock-pierce-1240462/
>How Brock Pierce ended up as a Jeffrey Epstein guest along with a NASA computer engineer, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and a Nobel laureate in theoretical physics is bizarre tale involving Steve Bannon and an international man of mystery who may or may not be dead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847600
>Who remembers the World of Warcraft oriented Thottbot web site, and how it pivoted to farming and selling gold, and who was involved, and what they're doing now? It's a fascinating, lurid, and twisted story, worthy of its own Connections episode by James Burke. [...]
>Through a dramatic saga of infighting and scams and scandals and lawsuits, ex-child-actor-who-turned-into-a-banana then underage-sexual-abuse-scandal-triggered-dot-com-scam-video-streaming-company-ipo-meltdown-involved and now Trump-boot-licking-crypto-bro-new-age-burning-man-whack-job and failed-presidential-candidate Brock Pierce spun the company out into Affinity Media.
1995 Betty Crocker Gushers Commercial, in which Brock Pierce turns into a banana:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyzt3Q05Ris&t=10s
If I have this straight, Brock Pierce is one of the people running tether.
This means that potentially one of histories biggest ponzi schemes is being run by someone who has an entire documentary (An Open Secret) about them running a child prostitution ring and whose roommate was convicted of child prostitution and was also named in the related civil suit.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3677412/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TAnAYa8gas
Who remembers the World of Warcraft oriented Thottbot web site, and how it pivoted to farming and selling gold, and who was involved, and what they're doing now? It's a fascinating, lurid, and twisted story, worthy of its own Connections episode by James Burke.
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Thottbot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thottbot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documentary)
WOW is extensible in Lua, and there are lots of cool, even sophisticated extensions, including Auctioneer, which analyzed and remembered histories of items and prices on the auction house, and helped you make lots of money selling items in the game.
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/auctioneer
The Thottbot web site was an enormously useful catalog of ALL WoW items (and monster drops, weapon stats, monster spawn locations, and character profile data), which was gathered by the Thottbot WoW plugin written in Lua, that monitored network messages and kept a journal of every object a player encountered, then uploaded them to the Thottbot web site.
Thottbot was originally created by Bill "Aftathott" Dyess and run by Wowhead, but then was bought by a company named ZAM (for Alakazam).
https://www.wow-pro.com/wowhead-sells-to-zam-ige-for-over-1-million/
Then ZAM was bought be a slimy gold farming company called IGE, whose parent company was RPG Holdings, and they incorporated it into their gold farming and selling empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGE
Through a dramatic saga of infighting and scams and scandals and lawsuits, ex-child-actor-who-turned-into-a-banana then underage-sexual-abuse-scandal-triggered-dot-com-scam-video-streaming-company-ipo-meltdown-involved and now Trump-boot-licking-crypto-bro-new-age-burning-man-whack-job and failed-presidential-candidate Brock Pierce spun the company out into Affinity Media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Pierce
Brock Pierce worked with none other than Steve Bannon at Affinity Media, farming and selling virtual gold online. That was where Steve Bannon discovered and started fanning the toxic hateful easily manipulated sexually frustrated incel culture that he exploited and replicated to launch GamerGate and the Alt Right MAGA whack-jobs, which led to electing Trump, which led to the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon#Entertainment_and_media
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1354727245449990145
>1/ Hey guys, remember that time Steve Bannon ran an army of game virtual currency miners in Asia, for sale to westerners at discount prices, arbitraging attention for profit? That was awesome...
John Oliver did a hilarious story about Bitcoin featuring Brock Pierce:
Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg
Here's Brock Pierce spouting cryptocurrency bullshit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=1182s
And here is Brock Pierce as a child turning into a banana:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=1220s
John Oliver recommended "Just google Brock Pierce Scandal, that's all I'm saying there."
https://www.google.com/search?q=brock+pierce+scandal
Brock Pierce was deeply and notoriously involved with the DEN sexual abuse scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
Before he worked with Steve Bannon, now-convicted sex offender Marc Collins-Rector was Brock Pierce's original partner in crime at DEN (which been called "the poster child for dot-com excesses"), and when DEN's IPO collapsed when the child enticement indictments were leveled, they both fled their LA party mansion and went on the lam together, then got arrested by Interpol in their party mansion in Marbella, Spain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Collins-Rector
Fucked Company made a hilarious documentary all about DEN in the format of a South Park style swf file, which was eventually uploaded to youtube, but has since been taken down. But I saved a copy of the swf file, although I don't know how to view it now. (Anybody know how to convert it? VLC is supposed to play it, but it's not working for me, just playing audio...):
https://donhopkins.com/home/movies/FuckedCompany_DigitalEntertainmentNetwork.swf
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Here are some stories about Steve Bannon's involvement with Brock Pierce and virtual gold farming:
Trump Campaign CEO Once Worked for a World of Warcraft Marketplace
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/stephen-bannon-world-warcraft-gold-farming-donald-trump/
>Stephen Bannon brought quite the varied résumé to his new gig as CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At various points, Bannon has worked as an investment banker, earned money off Seinfeld royalties, overseen a biosphere, directed films, and run an alt-right news site. But one of the stranger blips on his career path came in the mid-aughts, when Bannon joined and eventually ran a company that made its name and fortune as an online marketplace to sell virtual gold to World of Warcraft players and other online gamers.
Trump's Campaign CEO's Little Known World of Warcraft Career
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/trumps-campaign-ceos-little-known-world-warcraft-career/
>BEFORE HE BECAME CEO of the Donald Trump campaign, and before he took over the alt-right media outlet Breitbart, Steve Bannon made his living selling virtual gold on the Internet.
The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire
https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/
Brock Pierce was appointed as a board member to the Bitcoin Foundation, and several people resigned over his links to sex abuse:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/some-in-bitcoin-group-resign-over-new-board-members-link-to-sex-abuse/
And here is a photo of Brock Pierce at Trump's inauguration proudly wearing a red "Make Bitcoin Great Again" cap.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155736654012782&set=a.112810102781.118888.749357781&type=3&theater
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/13/crypto-puerto-rico/
>‘Crypto colonizers’ in Puerto Rico try to sell locals on the dream. A new wave of wealthy investors is moving to the island. Locals are greeting them with excitement — and suspicion.
There is a documentary called "An Open Secret" all about all the underage sexual abuse, cocaine, guns, threats, extortion, and all kinds of other shit that went down at DEN, which showed interviews with the people involved, including lots of evidence like videos and photos and printouts of emails from Brock Pierce and others proving what happened, but apparently Brock Pierce or other alleged Hollywood child abusers who didn't like what the documentary said sued to take it down and suppress it, so it's not on youtube any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Secret
SAG-AFTRA Threatened To Sue Director Amy Berg Over ‘An Open Secret’
https://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-open-secret-director-amy-berg-1201438339/
I found the PG-13 version here:
AN OPEN SECRET. Official PG-13 version. Copyright Esponda Productions LLC #AnOpenSecret
https://vimeo.com/142444429
>In light of the long awaited revelations of sexual abuse in Hollywood finally being reported ESPONDA PRODUCTIONS presents AN OPEN SECRET for free for a limited time . A film about the sexual abuse of children in the entertainment industry in Hollywood. Please support our efforts of raising awareness by sharing with your friends and colleagues. #AnOpenSecret #BeCourageous #ReportIt #LifeGetsBetter. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook @AnOpenSecret.
No, this isn't just a bunch of Q-Anon Pizzagate bullshit. It it all went down and was well documented a long long time before Q-Anon. Although it may have inspired some of those conspiracy theories via psychological projection.
But Brock Pierce's deep involvement with the Alt-Right, MAGA whack jobs like Steve Bannon, and Bitcoin bros, as well as his latest hypocritical presidential campaign to end human trafficking (and the fact that he also attended the Mindshift conference that Jeffrey Epstein supported, after he had already been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor), just goes to show how much that Q-Anon Alt-Right MAGA bullshit is all just about psychological projection and hypocrisy.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-brock-pierce-the-presidential-candidate-with-ties-to-two-pedophiles-who-wants-to-end-human-trafficking
>Meet Brock Pierce, the Presidential Candidate With Ties to Pedophiles Who Wants to End Human Trafficking
>In the trailer for First Kid, the forgettable 1996 comedy about a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the president’s son, the title character, played by a teenage Brock Pierce, describes himself as “definitely the most powerful kid in the universe.” Now, the former child star is running to be the most powerful man in the world, as an Independent candidate for President of the United States.
>Before First Kid, the Minnesota-born actor secured roles in a series of PG-rated comedies, playing a young Emilio Estevez in The Mighty Ducks, before graduating to smaller parts in movies like Problem Child 3: Junior in Love. When his screen time shrunk, Pierce retired from acting for a real executive role: co-founding the video production start-up Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) alongside businessman Marc Collins-Rector. At age 17, Pierce served as its vice president, taking in a base salary of $250,000.
>DEN became “the poster child for dot-com excesses,” raising more than $60 million in seed investments and plotting a $75 million IPO. But it turned into a shorthand for something else when, in October of 1999, the three co-founders suddenly resigned. That month, a New Jersey man filed a lawsuit alleging Collins-Rector had molested him for three years beginning when he was 13 years old. The following summer, three former DEN employees filed a sexual-abuse lawsuit against Pierce, Collins-Rector, and their third co-founder, Chad Shackley. The plaintiffs later dropped their case against Pierce (he made a payment of $21,600 to one of their lawyers) and Shackley. But after a federal grand jury indicted Collins-Rector on criminal charges in 2000, the DEN founders left the country. When Interpol arrested them in 2002, they said they had confiscated “guns, machetes, and child pornography” from the trio’s beach villa in Spain.
>While abroad, Pierce had pivoted to a new venture: Internet Gaming Entertainment, which sold virtual accessories in multiplayer online role-playing games to those desperate to pay, as one Wired reporter put it, “as much as $1,800 for an eight-piece suit of Skyshatter chain mail” rather than earn it in the games themselves. In 2005, a 25-year-old Pierce hired then-Goldman Sachs banker Steve Bannon—just before he would co-found Breitbart News. Two years later, after a World of Warcraft player sued the company for “diminishing” the fun of the game, Steve Bannon replaced Pierce as CEO.
The lesson: Be careful who you buy virtual gold and Bitcoin from, and never trust MAGA Bitcoin Bros!
> Brock Pierce
Excellent documentary involving him called "Open Secret".
"I've been disgusted with how the entire bitcoin community is relying on a bunch of people who do nothing more than tweeting all day spreading propaganda."
The fish rots from the head. See my posting about Brock Pierce, Director of the Bitcoin Foundation, and the film about him, "An Open Secret".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15681189
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5icPtmLsTy4
Yeah, THIS Brock Pierce:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155736654012782&set=a.112810102781.118888.749357781&type=3&theater
The creepiest comment on that photo is "I'd love to see a pic of you shaking the Donald's hand, each wearing your respective hats. And Baron is going to need your advice and counsel. Need to make this happen."
I hope nobody feels it's inappropriate to name a sexual harasser leading the Bitcoin community, but is there any chance the recent coverage of sexual harassment and rape in Hollywood, SAG AFTRA, and other industries will open more people's eyes about Brock Pierce, the Director of the Bitcoin Foundation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Pierce
"In 2000, three young actors filed a civil lawsuit claiming Pierce sexually abused them, also naming fellow Digital Entertainment Network executives Chad Shackley and Marc Collins-Rector. He was an Executive VP at Digital Entertainment Network when he was arrested with other company executives by Interpol in Spain in May 2002."
Here's a brief South Park style documentary on the DEN scandal that Fucked Company posted contemporaneously: "Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14674632
It's like Pizzagate, but true! (But you should still ignore anything Alex Jones has to say about it.)
If you think it's just a joke or conspiracy theory, then watch the film "An Open Secret" which goes into much more lurid detail with lots of first person testimony and evidence, that shows what's been uncovered in the time since Fucked Company's much shorter, less serious but largely accurate documentary. Not surprisingly they've had a lot of trouble distributing that film.
An Open Secret Trailer 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjQvFgkI0R4
"An Open Secret": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5icPtmLsTy4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Secret
"According to Gabe Hoffman who financed the film: "We got zero Hollywood offers to distribute the film. Not even one. Literally no offers for any price whatsoever." On 12 October 2017, Hoffman and Valentinas released the film for nine days on Vimeo "to commemorate serial predator Harvey Weinstein finally being exposed." It went viral, and free viewing was then extended for a longer period due to the interest shown in the film, with over 3 million viewings garnered on various social media platforms in the first two weeks."
http://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-open-secret-director-amy-berg-1201438339/
"Leaders of SAG-AFTRA tried to sanitize director Amy Berg’s explosive documentary about the sexual abuse of child actors in Hollywood, threatening to sue her if she didn’t remove all references to the union from An Open Secret, which opens in a platform release in three cities beginning today. It may be the first time a Hollywood union has ever threatened to take legal action against a filmmaker over the content of a film."
Here's the money shot where they show the pills, the gun safe, the receipts and emails from Brock Pierce to Chad Shackley and Marc Collins Rector, in which Brock Pierce is sending Chad Shackley email with photos of scantily dressed young boys for him cherry pick for recruiting and grooming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5icPtmLsTy4&t=1h8m8s
"It's an email from Brock to Chad. And it says 'What do you think?' and then there's a picture of a young boy. This one says from Brock to Chad, 'another interesting one from MI'. Chad's response on that one was 'That's a yummy one :)' And Brock writes to him 'Would you like me to contact either of them?' Chad writes 'They both look cute, but what's their deal?'"
There was some discussion of these facts with more links to evidence in the thread about "Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment (nytimes.com)".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14674632
And here is photo of Brock Pierce chilling at Trump's inaugural lounge with his "MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN" cap.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155736654012782&set=a.112810102781.118888.749357781&type=3&theater
And then of course there's the Steve Bannon connection:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/stephen-bannon-world-warcraft-gold-farming-donald-trump/
https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/trumps-campaign-ceos-little-known-world-warcraft-career/
Now what was that about draining the swamp?
I think I included most of the links I intended (some were repeats from the previous message but bore repeating in context, and the last one to the timeline has a lot of other fascinating links), but here is another interesting one from Buzzfeed about An Open Secret:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/an-open-secret-hollywood-underage-sex-abuse-documentary
I don't get why you were downvoted. The documentary "An Open Secret" is quite accurate and confirms everything I ever heard about DEN, provides a whole lot of background information and first person interviews, and is consistent with the information in the lawsuits that Brock Pierce tried to cover up and suppress. The video tape that the kid they molested took of Rector's house with all the pills, the gun safe, and photocopies he made of all the documents, the email with discussions and photos of kids Pierce and Rector were grooming, and the audio tape of the confession about molesting the kid, were all very chilling and quit convincing. This is no "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory: it really happened and is very well documented by many consistent sources.
Oh yeah: I guess the Bannon links are worth repeating in this context too, because it's one of the most mind blowing parts of this whole story, now that he's running the country into the ground.
Here are the links about Steve Bannon (Wired published an article in 2008 before Steve Bannon was widely known as the real President of the United States who dresses as Death, then in 2016 Mother Jones pointed out the old Wired article, and then Wired published another article mentioning it):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZOF9q5fzfs
https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/stephen-bannon-world-warcraft-gold-farming-donald-trump/
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/trumps-campaign-ceos-little-known-world-warcraft-career/
Oh yeah #2: thanks to Richard Bartle and Wired, here is the the original Debonneville lawsuit complaint and the amended complaint that Brock Pierce illegitimately and unsuccessfully tried to suppress, which documents in great detail the lurid story of DEN, IGE, the Debonneville lawsuit, "Pierce's Great Cover Up", and discusses Steve Bannon's involvement.
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~rabartle/debonnevillecomplaint.pdf
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2008/QBlog220208A.html
"Bullies with money are still bullies."
https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/archive/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ige_complaint.pdf
30. Steve Bannon ("Bannon") was hired around March 2005 to head the effort of obtaining private equity investment into IGE and eventually take IGE public. All the shareholders wished to cash out on their respective equity in the wildly successful business. From March 2005 to February 2006, Bannon and Pierce's primary focus was on raising investment money for the company. Upon information and belief, during June and July of 2005, Pierce determined that, based on IGE's incredible success, IGE would be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Upon information and belief, Pierce wanted more stock for his own account. Upon information and belief, Pierce developed a scheme whereby he could pressure Yantis into selling his shares of the company for a value far lower than what Pierce believe the stock would be valued once an investment into the company was achieved.
51. In late January of 2006 and throughout February of 2006, Pierce advised Debonneville that Rector was blackmailing Pierce. Pierce stated that Rector was threatening to involve IGE in litigation which would severely cripple the likelihood of closing the GS [Goldman Sachs] investment. Further, Rector was threatening protracted litigation that would harm IGE and kill any future investment potential. It is believed that this was a false statement made by Pierce in January 2006.
Wow, thank you for posting for that link! I just finished watching "An Open Secret" for the first time, and it chillingly corroborates most of what Fucked Company humorously presented in that South-Park style documentary, which is how I first heard about the story when Fucked Company covered it contemporaneously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaRTZpJgPA
https://youtu.be/4eeGX4SlF1s?t=1h8m8s
I only learned about about Steve Bannon's connection to Brock Pierce (who recently posted a Facebook photo of himself wearing a red "MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN" trucker's cap at Trump's Inaugural Lounge) when Mother Jones and Wired covered it during the last election. It looks like the "First Kid" is trying to work his way back into the White House.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155736654012782&set=a.112810102781.118888.749357781&type=3&theater
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t7ubr0jBII
Here's a fascinating article I just found about how SAG AFTRA tried to censor and suppress "An Open Secret":
http://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-open-secret-director-amy-berg-1201438339/
And here's a a map of the rabbit warren: a timeline of the scandals that started at DEN, including Brock's attempts to whitewash his past and ongoing lawsuits around his online gold trading company IGE, which Steve Bannon was involved with, up to his election to the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and the resulting resignations:
DEN Sources: A document-in-progress compiling firsthand reporting on DEN, Bitcoin, Brock Pierce and the Mike Egan / Bryan Singer lawsuit
https://medium.com/@cuttlefish_btc/den-sources-af289efd690b
What do you mean by "If you didnt believe in #PG prior"?
If you havent watched "An Open Secret" (about DEN) then you dont know how deep the rabbit hole goes...
If you didnt believe in #PG prior, DEN's documentary; an open secret may just change your mind...
https://youtu.be/4eeGX4SlF1s?t=1595