Santa Monica, Calif. — When the Wikimedia Foundation asks the public for money, it tells donors that Wikipedia's volunteers "work together to create and verify the pages you rely on, supported by tools that undo vandalism within minutes, ensuring the information you seek is trustworthy."

When the Wikimedia Foundation gets sued, it tells the court, and the world, something different.

In legal filings, filed early this month in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, lawyers for the nonprofit asked a judge to throw out a $1 billion lawsuit brought by the film producer Ryan Kavanaugh by arguing — among other things — that the word "trustworthy" on Wikipedia's donation page is "inherently subjective and unquantifiable" puffery on which no reasonable person would rely.

"Court after court," the filing reads, "has rejected as 'puffery' claims based on that word."

That contention sits at the center of Kavanaugh v. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., Case No. 26SMCV01004, a case that has quietly become one of the most direct legal tests in years of how the world's ninth most-visited website presents itself to the public versus how it defends itself when its content is alleged to have caused real-world harm. A hearing on Wikimedia's motion to dismiss is scheduled for October 29 before Judge Lisa K. Sepe-Wiesenfeld of the Santa Monica Courthouse.

The Plaintiff

Mr. Kavanaugh is one of Hollywood's most prolific independent producers. According to the complaint filed by his attorneys at JW Howard/Attorneys, Ltd., he has been involved in financing, producing, or distributing more than 250 feature films — including The Fighter, Limitless, The Social Network, Mamma Mia! and the Fast & Furious franchise — with collective box-office receipts in the tens of billions of dollars. Variety once named him its first "Billion Dollar Producer." Forbes once placed him on its list of America's most charitable people. He is currently in production on Killing Satoshi, directed by Doug Liman, and according to public filings has been instrumental in taking two companies public in the last four years alone. He was a key architect for Marvel Studios, responsible for the very first SVOD deal with Netflix, and built the second largest sports agency in the United States, according to Forbes, among many other accolades. But do not look to Wikipedia to share any of the above information, all of which can be found and validated through readily available public resources.

"It's as if someone just decided to erase anything good that Mr. Kavanaugh ever did in his life, and exaggerate, or in many cases just make up, things to create a false image that any sane person can only read as an attempt to significantly harm my client," said a representative for Mr. Kavanaugh.

He is also, by his own account in the complaint, a man whose Wikipedia page has cost him a fortune.

What the Lawsuit Alleges

The complaint, filed February 20, alleges that beginning in November 2021, two anonymous Wikipedia editors — using the handles "Throast" and "Popoki35" — launched what amounted to a coordinated campaign to rewrite Mr. Kavanaugh's page in the most damaging terms they could justify. The two editors together authored roughly 79 percent of the article's current content, according to Wikipedia's own authorship-tracking tools cited in the filing.

The campaign, the complaint alleges, was not organic. It was directed by Ethan Klein, a YouTube personality with roughly two million Instagram followers and a long-running podcast, whose copyright dispute with a company Mr. Kavanaugh had invested in spiraled into a years-long online vendetta.

What makes this matter damning for Wikipedia is that the allegation of biased, paid, and intentionally misleading editing — and thus an inaccurate Wikipedia — was proven by Mr. Kavanaugh in court. After Mr. Kavanaugh sued Mr. Klein for defamation, defeated an anti-SLAPP motion in both the trial court and on appeal, and pursued the case for nearly three years, Mr. Klein signed a sworn declaration on June 12, 2025, attached to the complaint as Exhibit A. In it, he admitted that he "caused, influenced, encouraged, and indirectly helped coordinate the attack with both of the aforementioned editors" and that the editors "did [it] for compensation."

"The changes to Kavanaugh's Wikipedia page were not neutral. I am aware that all changes made by both of those editors were done with the intent to harm, defame, discredit, and mislead readers about Mr. Kavanaugh."

Mr. Klein went further. He acknowledged selling "I am Throast" merchandise designed to obscure the lead editor's identity by flooding the internet with the username, modeled on the famous "I am Spartacus" sequence. He acknowledged devoting hours of podcast airtime to walking his audience through the page changes "knowing that it might encourage others to participate in the creation of a false and misleading Wikipedia page, with the intent to harm Ryan Kavanaugh."

A private investigation cited in the complaint identifies Popoki35 as Sara Kathleen Smith, a California resident with no professional background in Hollywood or finance, no education relevant to or worthy of her being an editor on Mr. Kavanaugh's page. Throast's identity remains undisclosed. And therein lies the pickle. Wikipedia has stated essentially it is not their job, nor do they make any claims to fix inaccurate information, harmful or not. Rather they claim it is Mr. Kavanaugh's job to go after the source itself. Mr. Kavanaugh not only did that, but won, in court against the source itself. Now the source is directing Wikipedia to make the changes, and they have refused.

The Demand and the Refusal

On August 21, 2025, Mr. Kavanaugh's outside counsel at Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch LLP delivered a 20-page letter to Stephen LaPorte, Wikimedia's general counsel, attaching the Klein declaration. The letter asked Wikimedia to restore the page to its May 17, 2021 version — the last iteration before the alleged campaign began — and to ban Throast and Popoki35 from the platform. That letter is attached here on this link.

According to the complaint, Wikimedia did neither. Throast continued editing the page, the lawsuit alleges, and "whenever an editor adds something positive about Kavanaugh to his Wikipedia page, Throast and company immediately remove it."

When Mr. Kavanaugh published a copy of the 2021 version, the version that Wikipedia had up the day before Throast and Popoki35 began "vandalzing" his page, of the page on his own server, the complaint alleges, Wikimedia successfully had it taken down.

The Harm Alleged

The complaint catalogues damages in the billion-dollar range. Mr. Kavanaugh alleges he has lost "dozens of deals, including several valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, solely because of the vandalism on his Wikipedia page." He has stepped down from corporate boards, the complaint says, and passed on directorships. "His Wikipedia has been a major topic of discussion in most of his business transactions since late 2021. To proceed, Kavanaugh often must prove the page was created by compensated vandals."

And that is where Wikipedia has a big problem. The argument Wikipedia is making, in response, is that no reasonable person assumes Wikipedia is fact checked, accurate, or that Wikipedia takes any steps to correct false information. To the contrary, they argue, people know Wikipedia does none of those things and therefore it is known by all not to be a source to be relied upon. Mr. Kavanaugh, however, points to comparisons that place Wikipedia's answer in question.

The complaint cites a comparison that is, on its face, hard to ignore. Tucker Tooley joined Relativity Media in 2007 and served as its president from 2011 to 2015, and as Vice Chairman of the board — the year the company filed for bankruptcy. His Wikipedia page, the complaint notes, describes his success at Relativity but does not mention the bankruptcy. Similar comparisons are drawn to the pages of Harry Sloan, who was MGM's chief executive when it filed for bankruptcy, and the producer Mark Canton, who served as a primary board member of Relativity for years prior and up to and through the bankruptcy, and whose companies have a documented history of fraud and breach-of-contract litigation that does not appear in his article. Or Steven Mnuchin, the ex-Goldman Sachs hedge fund manager who most recently served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Trump. He was, in fact, Chairman of Relativity, a title generally ranked higher than CEO, the title Mr. Kavanaugh held. Mr. Kavanaugh, at the time of the events in question, was also a minority shareholder with 18 percent of the company, and the company had a very powerful, hands-on board of directors. And yet, Kavanaugh argues, his page is the only one of the above to be "vandalized" — the others enjoy fairly positive Wikipedia descriptions.

Wikimedia's Defense

The filing on Wikimedia's behalf is striking less for what it disputes than for what it does not.

Wikimedia does not argue, in this filing, that Mr. Kavanaugh's page is well-sourced or fair. It does not contest that Throast and Popoki35 authored most of the article. It does not contest the substance of Mr. Klein's sworn declaration. Instead, it makes three legal moves.

The first is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — the federal statute that shields online platforms from liability for content posted by users. The demurrer argues that every one of Mr. Kavanaugh's claims, however styled, "seeks to hold Wikimedia liable as the speaker or publisher of user-generated content" and is therefore barred.

The second move is more revealing. Wikipedia argues that the language on its own donation page — about taking steps to correct inaccuracies and working to create accurate pages — is, in legal terms, not a promise at all, but rather an aspirational statement, not to be relied upon.

"Aspirational statements about collaborative editing based on verifiable secondary resources and the provision of technical tools to address vandalism," the demurrer reads, "do not constitute a promise that all content will be accurate."

The filing then points to Wikimedia's Terms of Use — language that has been on its website for years — which states: "Generally, we do not contribute, monitor, or delete content. … This means that editorial control is in the hands of you and your fellow users who create and manage the content." Elsewhere the Terms specify that Wikimedia "do[es] not represent or guarantee the truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any submitted community content."

The third move is the one most likely to make a donor blink. Wikipedia argues that the word "trustworthy" — the word it uses on its donation page to describe what users get for their contributions — is, as a matter of law, meaningless puffery.

"Trustworthy, moreover, is inherently subjective and unquantifiable."

So states Wikipedia. Their argument: that calling something "trustworthy" or "reliable" is the kind of advertising boast no reasonable consumer takes seriously.

"No reasonable consumer," Wikimedia's filing continues, "would interpret a generalized description of Wikipedia's collaborative model … as a concrete or enforceable representation about how the platform will perform in any particular instance."

The legal posture matters because of how much money Wikipedia raises on the language it is now describing as non-binding.

According to the complaint, citing Wikimedia's most recent publicly available Form 990, the foundation raised more than $174 million in 2023. It holds in excess of $200 million in assets.

Its annual fundraising drive, broadcast to roughly the ninth most-visited website on the internet, leans heavily on the same vocabulary the demurrer now describes as aspirational — words like "verify," "trustworthy" and "the information you seek."

In the demurrer, Wikipedia compares its donation page line to the New York Times's slogan "All the News That's Fit to Print" — a phrase, the filing suggests, that "no reasonable reader would view … as anything more than aspirational."

Beyond the legal arguments, the complaint and its attached letter from Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch lay out an unusually detailed forensic account of what was done to the page.

Of the 92 footnoted sources on Mr. Kavanaugh's Wikipedia article as of last summer, 69 were retrieved or archived between November 2021 and February 2022 — the period when, the complaint alleges, and Mr. Klein himself corroborates, Mr. Klein was at the height of his on-air campaign and Throast and Popoki35 were making the bulk of their edits. Expanding the window to the full period of Mr. Klein's prolific anti-Kavanaugh content brings the total to 80 of 92 sources, or 86 percent.

The 20-page demand letter to Wikimedia documents specific edits the plaintiff contends violate Wikipedia's own published policies — its rules on biographies of living persons, on conflicts of interest, on neutral point of view, on paid editing, on harassment, and on what the platform itself defines as vandalism. The letter quotes from each policy and matches them against specific edits.

Among the changes documented in the letter: the removal of Mr. Kavanaugh's 2011 "Showman of the Year" award from Variety; and the addition of a paragraph dwelling on an unfounded controversy over whether he graduated from UCLA (he did, according to the UCLA registrar).

"How can it be that Wikipedia can allow an entire section challenging Mr. Kavanaugh's educational background when UCLA themselves confirmed Mr. Kavanaugh's degree to Wikipedia? It's just not good enough for them to say 'The UCLA Registrar' — the official UC record-keeping system, a system controlled and owned by the state — 'is not considered by Wikipedia as a reliable source,' but some random gossip blog is," continued his representative.

And, perhaps most egregious, the prominent placement of a "Ponzi scheme" allegation that the supposed accuser later publicly disclaimed in Variety, telling the publication that "any reference to ESX or any related business as a 'Ponzi Scheme' is not accurate." Mr. Kavanaugh and Mr. Spar both further confirmed that Mr. Kavanaugh had, in fact, funded the entire business in question from his own pocket.

None of the above disclaimers appear on the current Wikipedia page.

Soon, Mr. Kavanaugh's lawyers will have something they say they have been unable to obtain anywhere else: subpoena power over the identities of anonymous Wikipedia editors and the internal communications of a foundation that raises nine figures a year on a single sentence its own lawyers now describe as non-binding aspiration.

Whichever way it goes, the demurrer is on the record. A nonprofit that occupies a near-monopolistic position as the world's reference work — cited by judges, scraped by Google, fed into the major AI models — has filed a sworn legal document arguing that its assurances of trustworthiness are not assurances at all. That document will sit on the public docket in Santa Monica regardless of how Judge Sepe-Wiesenfeld rules.

For donors who gave $174 million last year on the strength of those assurances, the question Mr. Kavanaugh's lawsuit raises is not whether Wikipedia is sometimes wrong. It is what, if anything, the Wikimedia Foundation is actually promising when it asks for the check.