Pacquiao targets firms he says made knowingly

The case may be made that those who conceived and organized the 2015 boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao deserve to be compensated.

After all, the “Fight of the Century” at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas — gained by Mayweather — set information with 4.6 million pay-per-view buys and $72 million in ticket gross sales.

So it’s no shock that long after both boxers slipped comfortably into (momentary) retirement, legal fights endured over even slim slices of that cash-stuffed pie.

For 10 years — and counting — attorneys and judges have tried to decide what claimants are due and whether or not Pacquiao in explicit suffered reputational injury along the way in which.

Meanwhile, retirement is relegated to the rear view and a rematch Sept. 19 at the Las Vegas Sphere might be streamed live on Netflix. Mayweather is 49 and Pacquiao 47, yet another staggering payday serves as a great motivator.

And court battles continue. The latest salvo was a submitting by Pacquiao this week in Los Angeles Superior Court accusing revered law firms and their restaurant server consumer of making an attempt to extort thousands and thousands of {dollars} from the boxer by fabricating a verbal settlement and falsely accusing him of texting images of dismembered our bodies in a “terror campaign.”

Gabriel Rueda was a waiter at Craig’s restaurant in West Hollywood when he sued Pacquiao in 2016, claiming he was owed a finder’s price of $8.6 million for connecting the boxer’s coach Freddie Roach with then-CBS president Leslie Moonves to prepare the 2015 struggle with Mayweather.

Rueda demanded $42 million in damages. Enter former boxer Richie Palmer — a pal of Roach and husband of Rachel Welch — who told a decide that Rueda promised him half of his finder’s price if he might convey together Roach and Moonves.

A decide granted Pacquiao a abstract judgment in 2024, dismissing Rueda’s case and making Palmer’s declare moot.

Now Pacquiao is delivering a counterpunch. This week he filed a malicious prosecution lawsuit, looking for compensatory and punitive damages against Rueda and deep-pocketed law firms Khan Law Office and Withers Bergman, as properly as defunct firm Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht.

Pacquiao asserts in the submitting that he never communicated with Rueda about a Roach-Moonves assembly, let alone agreed to pay him something.

His attorneys produced a letter from Rueda meant for Mayweather that was not found until 2023 through court-ordered forensic recovery of Rueda’s iCloud account.

According to the lawsuit, Rueda said in the letter that he “asked for nothing in return,” for introducing Roach to Moonves. “No finders fee, no compensation.” Rueda was given a ticket to the 2015 struggle, a resort room in Las Vegas and $10,000 to cowl bills, according to the submitting.

Pacquiao alleges that the e-mail was hidden by Rueda and his attorneys despite discovery requests and a 2018 court order compelling manufacturing.

Pacquiao’s grievance also established that the texts of physique elements and threats to Rueda had been truly duplicates of messages from a widely distributed drug cartel rip-off. Rueda claimed in 2020 that he obtained textual content messages of pictures of dismembered our bodies from associates of Pacquiao.

But information produced by Pacquiao’s attorneys confirmed that at least one of the messages was despatched to more than 100 people in what the grievance describes as a “cartel scam.” Rueda dropped the declare in 2024 after Pacquiao’s workforce discredited it.

Pacquiao’s attorneys wrote that his lawsuit is “arising from one of the most egregious abuses of the civil justice system — the deliberate prosecution of knowingly false and sensational allegations for the purpose of inflicting reputational damage and coercing payment.

“Defendants knowingly and deliberately misused the judicial process to prosecute claims that were completely fabricated from the outset and directly refuted by evidence that Defendants knew about, possessed, and suppressed.”

Pacquiao’s attorneys said the boxer “incurred millions of dollars in legal fees and costs to clear his name.”

While the lawsuit is litigated, Pacquiao possible might be training for his rematch with Mayweather, who is concerned in legal motion of his own.

Earlier this month, Mayweather sued Showtime and former government Stephen Espinoza for $340 million, accusing them of depriving him of a “significant portion of his career earnings.” He alleges that Showtime “through a complex web of hidden accounts, unauthorized transactions, and deliberate concealment of financial records,” wrongly paid some of his earnings to his former supervisor, Al Haymon.

Pacquiao and Mayweather must be cutting some severe checks to their attorneys. But their rematch ought to earn them more than enough to cowl legal bills: Mayweather made at least $250 million and Pacquiao at least $125 million for their first struggle, which generated more than $600 million in whole income.