Naomi Osaka, Tom Brady and other FTX endorsers move to dismiss $11-billion lawsuit

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Naomi Osaka and several other sports stars including Tom Brady and Shaquille O’Neal may be close to catching a big break after being named as defendants in an $11-billion class action lawsuit.

Last year’s collapse of FTX—once one of the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency exchanges, with a $32 billion valuation—sent shockwaves across financial markets, and has triggered a flurry of finger-pointing and legal actions. Investors soon homed in on FTX’s stable of celebrity spokespeople, including Osaka, in an effort to hold them responsible for promoting a “deceptive” platform.

On Thursday, the four-time Grand Slam champion joined Brady, his ex-wife Gisele Bundchen, Curry, O’Neal and other celebrities including Shohei Ohtani, David Ortiz, Trevor Lawrence, Udonis Haslem and Larry David in filing a motion to dismiss the lawsuit altogether.

Their defense, according to Sportico, claims that it’s unreasonable to hold the spokespeople accountable for the crypto company’s fraud—especially since more ‘sophisticated’ investors and politicians weren’t able to see through it either.

“Plaintiffs themselves, sophisticated investors, financial institutions, and even members of Congress all were unable to discern FTX’s fraud from the then-available information,” the statement reads. “It is implausible that simply ‘doing business’ with FTX was sufficient to put [spokespeople] on notice of fraud (indeed, FTX premised an ad on Curry’s being ‘not an expert’ on cryptocurrency).”

The petition, filed in a Miami federal court, adds that the plaintiffs “fail to explain how a [celebrity] appearing next to FTX’s name, or saying things like ‘FTX, you in?’, misleads or deceives.”

While their legal dispute remains ongoing, the 25-year-old recently scored a major win in a different business venture after her media company, Hana Kuma, raised $5 million in a fundraising round. The funding will also see Hana Kuma spin off from The SpringHill Co., which was founded by LeBron James and Maverick Carter and had incubated the company since its launch last summer.

“There was never any grand plan of ‘We’ll spend X amount of time under the SpringHill umbrella and then we’ll go and do it ourselves,'” Hana Kuma co-founder Stuart Duguid, Osaka’s agent, told The Hollywood Reporter.

“It just happened very organically and naturally, and it came to the point where we decided it was time to raise financing, build out the business and hire more people and have a more robust team and a more robust business plan.”

According to THR, Hana Kuma’s investors now include SpringHill, Fortnite owner Epic Games, Boston Red Sox owner Fenway Sports Group, Japanese conglomerate The Kinoshita Group and investment firm Disruptive.