Gray believes IPI hard drives may contain evidence for his racial discrimination suit

A former employee of Imperial Pacific International (CNMI) LLC, who is suing the casino operator for alleged racial discrimination and whose suit has already been granted a default judgment in his favor, now tells the court that his lawyers have obtained two hard drives from IPI that may contain information relevant to his lawsuit.

In court documents his lawyers filed last May 3 in the U.S. District Court for the NMI, Joshua Gray, who is represented in this case by William M. Fitzgerald and Bruce Berline, states that “there is no reasonable way to connect the data on the drives to plaintiff’s discovery requests, other than a document by document review. …The data is not organized in any such particular matter.” As such, Gray declared his support of a motion for the court to lift third-party confidentiality restrictions on the contents of the two hard drives in order to fully go through their contents.

Gray believes the discovery material he has been asking from IPI will support his allegation of racial discrimination. In essence, Gray, who is American, claims that he was replaced at IPI by a foreign, Chinese employee.

According to Gray’s May 3 filing, the two hard drives—a 4-terabyte hard drive with 1.03 terabytes of data and a white 2-terabyte hard drive with 97.47 gigabytes of emails respectively—contain unopenable emails of former IPI CEO Mark Brown, password-protected Excel spreadsheets, and emails “that appeared to be confidential such as communications between Phil Tydingco and Mark Brown.” Tydingco is the former general counsel for IPI.

Additionally, Gray states that he discovered a sub-folder within one of the drives that revealed “a single 49,000-page report apparently obtained from downloading Kelley Butcher’s cell phone.” Butcher is a former IPI lawyer.

IPI has violated past discovery orders filed by Gray, namely the order filed on Feb. 4 of this year. At that time, the court ordered IPI to produce the relevant files by March 18. A month later, with IPI still having not fulfilled the discovery order, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona ordered an entry of default against IPI. In essence, as a result of not supplying the relevant documents in time, IPI has to concede and award Gray the appropriate compensation he sought in his lawsuit.