Facebook Claimant Paul Ceglia Passes Lie Detector Test
PCMag.Com - Paul Ceglia, the man claiming to own half of billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's stake in the social networking giant, has passed a lie detector test that focused on the authenticity of a 2003 contract Facebook has alleged is a forgery, according to court documents filed Friday.The polygraph test showed "no deception" on the part of Ceglia, according to his lawyers. Ceglia hired Zuckerberg in 2003 to do some programming for a company called StreetFax then was persuaded by Zuckerberg to invest in Facebook, then a site only available to Harvard students.
Ceglia in April revealed transcripts of what he claimed was an email correspondence between himself and Zuckerberg, in which the latter gave Ceglia a 50 percent share of the company for his $1,000 investment, plus an additional 1 percent stake for every day Facebook was not online past Jan. 1, 2004.
Facebook's lawyers were dismissive of the polygraph test.
"This latest court filing confirms that the bogus emails are, literally, a cut-and-paste job, just like the so-called contract is a fraud," attorney Orin Snyder of Gibson Dunn, said in a statement emailed to media. There is a deafening silence in these papers: Ceglia does not dispute that he has a track record of forging documents to rip people off.
"And the fact that this plaintiff now has to rely on a polygraph test says it all. Everyone knows polygraph tests are easily manipulated, which is why courts routinely disregard them."
In addition to the email he claims is a contract, Ceglia's filing included emails in which Zuckerberg supposedly asked Ceglia to use StreetFax source code to power Facebook's search engine, and a proposal to charge alumni $29.95 a month to use the site, at the time called "The Facebook" and envisioned as purely for users with connections to a university.
Another email concerns an additional $1,000 that Ceglia invested, while others depict haggling over Ceglia's supposed stake in Facebook, with Zuckerberg at one point offering to refund Ceglia his money. More
