"I must receive $5,000 by next Saturday at midnight, or the scroll search functionality will be removed from the site," Zuckerberg wrote in a message to Ceglia on Feb. 21, 2004, about two weeks after he put "Thefacebook.com" online. Zuckerberg told Ceglia he owed him $10,500 of the $19,500 he'd been promised, according to the e-mails, filed by Facebook as part of the lawsuit in Buffalo, New York.
Facebook last month asked the judge to throw out the lawsuit. The incident supports Zuckerberg's defense that the contract on which Ceglia bases his claim to half of the CEO's Facebook holdings is a fake, defense attorney Orin Snyder of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP said in an e-mail April 9. A different contract Facebook claims is the actual agreement between the men shows Ceglia hired Zuckerberg for the StreetFax work alone, the lawyer said. Zuckerberg never acted on the threat to disable Ceglia's website, according to Snyder.
'Cyber-Briber'
Zuckerberg's 2004 e-mail to Ceglia prompted a lawyer connected to StreetFax at the time to refer to him as the "brat programmer" and "cyber-briber," according to messages included in Facebook's court papers. The company said it found the e-mails in Ceglia's electronic files.
The contract Facebook claims is genuine would have permitted Zuckerberg "to offline the site Streetfax.com and remove his program" for non-payment. The contract Ceglia claims Zuckerberg signed gives him no such right. In its court papers seeking dismissal of the suit, Facebook said Ceglia never paid Zuckerberg the remaining $10,500. The two last communicated in May 2004, according to Facebook.
Facebook has disclosed in court papers 15 of about 300 e-mails the company said it recovered from Zuckerberg's Harvard e-mail account, consisting of communications with Ceglia and others working for StreetFax at the time.
Frequently Demands Money
In the e-mails, Zuckerberg frequently demands money he claims Ceglia owes him, while Ceglia asks for more time to pay. The 15 messages span almost nine months, from Aug. 15, 2003, to May 7, 2004, shortly before Zuckerberg left Harvard for Palo Alto, California, where he ran Facebook until moving it last year.
Ceglia's lawyer, Dean Boland, said his client's computer experts aren't able to determine whether the Harvard e-mails are genuine or complete because they haven't had access to the Harvard e-mail server. Facebook, now based in Menlo Park, California, has also had exclusive access to computers Zuckerberg used in 2003 and 2004, and evidence from suits filed against the company by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Nirendra, Boland said.
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