Mullenweg’s Grip On WordPress Challenged In New Court Filing via @sejournal, @martinibuster

A Motion to Intervene has been filed in the WP Engine lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, alleging fifteen claims and seeking monetary awards along with changes to WordPress.org’s governance structure.

A motion to intervene is a legal request by a third party that seeks to join an ongoing lawsuit, the success of which hinges on proving that they have a significant interest in the outcome of a case.

Legal Filing Seeks To Take Control Of WordPress

Among  the requests made in the legal filing is one that compels Matt Mullenweg to create a WordPress Oversight Board to oversee the governance of the WordPress Foundation, WordPress.org and other related entities.

“D. Order Defendant Matt Mullenweg to establish a Governance Oversight Board as defined in the Proposed Order For Contempt filed by Michael Willman;”

Moderator Of WPDrama Subreddit

The person filing the court motion is a WordPress web developer and a moderator of the r/WPDrama subreddit named Michael Willman (LinkedIn profile), CEO of Redev, a WordPress development and SEO company, who alleges that Mullenweg banned him, which caused him to lose two clients and a significant amount of earnings because of those losses.

Willman contacted Search Engine Journal about the legal filing and offered a background explanation of what happened:

“Near the start of this dispute, I lost a large ($14,500) contract as a direct result of being banned by Matt along with everyone else loosely associated. We had just closed the contract mere days before and the client is just seeing all these stories, and they back out. Losing that revenue would eventually make us unable to serve our largest client at the time, and we lost them too.

I took this all personally, and I tried to take to his #ranting channel on Slack to respond to his inane blog posts and share how his actions had damaged me and got me to the point of being ready to sue him as well.

He then banned me in retaliation for that and afterwards claimed a message saying I was going to go to Houston to file other legal documents was a “physical threat.”

He has a long history of inconsistent application of the Code of Conduct and I don’t think he can show that his actions here were justified, my own reading of the Code of Conduct implies that some type of warning in private is the first step. “

That last part about the allegedly false claim that he made a physical threat against Matt Mullenweg is now a part of the new motion.

Post On Reddit

Mr. Willman posted about his motion on Reddit, saying that he will donate 5% of any monetary awards to WordPress.

Members of the Reddit WordPress community were supportive, with one member named JonOlds posting:

“A client backing out of a signed contract ($14,500) because you being banned created a significant change is the most clear-cut example of harm from the WPE bans that I’ve seen so far. Fuck MM, and I really hope this is granted.”

Another person wrote:

“Dude you’re my hero ❤

And I’m sorry for all this stuff that’s happened to you, it’s awful. I genuinely admire how well you’ve handled all this, while moderating this sub too.”

Claims For Relief

Section D of the filing lists fifteen claims, among them he cites that Mullenweg’s retaliatory actions disrupted existing client contracts and the ability to cultivate new clients. It also describes attempted extortion, libel and trade libel among the many other claims.

Three of the claims made in the motion:

“1. Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations
Defendant Matt Mullenweg’s actions, including banning Michael Willman from the Make.WordPress.org Slack workspace and retaliating against him, disrupted existing contractual relationships. Some specific examples are the $14,500 website development contract that was canceled due to Michael Willman being banned from WordPress.org, the remainder of another contract with Trellis that was lost valued at $5,526.35, and an ongoing relationship with Trellis that included active retainers valued at $4,700 per month in addition to regular ad-hoc work, the combination of which generated $77,638.65 in invoices in 2024.

2. Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations
By targeting and banning Michael Willman from essential WordPress platforms, Defendants interfered with potential business opportunities. The absence of new website development projects, loss of existing relationships and the unease expressed by clients about the WordPress ecosystem are direct results of these retaliatory actions.

4. Attempted Extortion
During discussions, Matt Mullenweg offered to refer clients to Michael Willman’s business on the condition that he cease working with WP Engine and join Automattic’s affiliate program. This constitutes coercive conduct aimed at disrupting Michael Willman’s business relationships.

6. Libel
Matt Mullenweg publicly claimed that Michael Willman made threats of physical violence, a statement that is objectively false and defamatory. This damaged Michael Willman’s reputation within the WordPress community and beyond.

7. Trade Libel
Public statements by Matt Mullenweg disparaged Michael Willman’s professional services and integrity, causing harm to his business relationships and reputation.”

Possible Outcome Of New Court Motion

The motion to intervene contains serious allegations of abuse of authority by the single most influential person in the open-source WordPress project, a worldwide ecosystem of developers, business users, publishers, plugin and theme developers and thousands of volunteers around the world who contribute to the development of the WordPress content management software.

The filing not only seeks restitution, it also asks the court for changes to the WordPress governance to remove Matt Mullenweg from his position of power at WordPress.

Read The Reddit Post And Legal Document

A link to the legal document is posted on a Reddit discussion about the filing:

Motion to Intervene & Motion for Contempt Filed in WPEngine, Inc. v. Automattic Inc.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Rose Tamani