Judge Says 'No' to Amway

Ashley Wilkes, author of Amway Motivational Organizations: The Nightmare Builders site, was one of the recipients of a subpoena from Amway in February. (See "Amway Goes Fishing, Uses Subpoenas for Bait".)

On April 22, Wilkes went to court to respond to Amway's motion to compel him to turn over his home and work computer hard drives for them to examine.The Magistrate Judge has denied Amway's motion.

Wilkes is not a party to any lawsuit involving Amway.

The judge's ruling stated, in part,

The Court finds that Amway has not shown that the information sought from Mr. Wilkes, a nonparty, is relevant or likely to lead to admissible evidence in its lawsuit against P & G. The fact that he has had some communications, the subject matter of which is unknown, with Schwartz, an alleged consultant of P & G, is insufficient to justify the burden on Mr. Wilkes of allowing the hard drives of his computers to be copied and searched. To the extent that there may be relevant e-mail communications between P & G and Mr. Wilkes, that information is obtainable from P & G. The motion to compel is denied.

Amway has ten days to appeal the decision. However, Amway's lawyers are likely to be very busy over the next ten days, since they need to defend an extremely serious suit against them by the Procter & Gamble company. Hearings in that case are scheduled to begin May 3.

Read Complete Text of Decision

Amway Goes Fishing, Uses Subpoenas for Bait

Read My Opinion of Amway's Vendetta