Sophia Stewart

Question

An important case here dashed apart by technicalities before it even began. What a letdown. I was damned curious to find out if she had a case and now we'll never know. Was the judge too harsh about those deadlines?

Usenet · Accepted Answer

@reader2.panix.com:
[nq:1]An important case here dashed apart by technicalities before it even began. What a letdown. I was damned curious to find out if she had a case and now we'll never know. Was the judge too harsh about those deadlines?[/nq]
Yes. No.
WTF are you talking about?
jaybee

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]@reader2.panix.com:[/nq]
[nq:2]An important case here dashed apart by technicalities before it even ... never know. Was the judge too harsh about those deadlines?[/nq]
[nq:1]Yes. No. WTF are you talking about?[/nq]
http://tinyurl.com/e3veu (registration required)
Sophia Stewarts' day in court ends with dismissal for the 'Mother of the Matrix'
By Quentin Wells
Published: Wednesday, July 20, 2005
The copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Sophia Stewart on April 24,
2003 against the Warchowski Brothers, Warner Bros. and others came to anend in the courtroom of the Honorable Margaret M Morrow, federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on June 14, 2005. The lawsuit alleged that the movies "The Matrix," and its two sequels, and "The Terminator," and its two sequels were all based on Stewart's novella entitled "The Third Eye."
Stewart's claims against all the defendants were summarily dismissed by Judge Morrow because she and her attorneys had failed, over the two year period since the case was filed, to respond in a timely manner to the court's schedule for management of the case.
The facts of the case were not heard at all in the proceedings that led to the dismissal. Rather, the court based its decision for dismissal on the fact that Stewart and her attorneys "had not been diligent either in pursuing or in responding to discovery. Despite the fact that the action had been on file for almost two years, she made no effort to propound any discovery to defendants until the fact discovery cut-off date set by the court. Nor did she respond in timely fashion to discovery propounded by defendants. This was consistent with the overall manner in which plaintiff has prosecuted the action, missing deadlines, seeking extensions, and generally ignoring the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures and court orders."
With the dismissal, Stewart's claim that she is the "Mother of the Matrix" and the creator of the ideas and characters upon which that movie series, as well as the "Terminator" series were based, appears to have died without ever having been heard in an open courtroom forum.

Whether or not she could have substantiated her allegations that "The Third Eye" was in fact the original creative concept behind the multi-billion dollar group of films will probably never be known since Stewart's attorney's did not prove the allegations through the court process.
The fortune in damage awards that Stewart might have been able to secure, had her claims been documented to the court's satisfaction, has vanished in the face of the court's ruling regarding her conduct and that of her attorneys in the case. She is now left with nothing but the expenses she has incurred in her pursuit of the matter plus the costs and attorneys fees of the defendants which were awarded to them by the court as a result of what it deemed Stewart's failure to reasonably follow the legal procedure set in motion when she first filed her claim

This case, which began as one of the largest (in terms of potential damage awards, if successful) and highest profile copyright infringement cases in U.S. history, has already had a tortured history since its inception, with a staggering amount of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies and libel being circulated about it on the Internet and through thousands of news outlets around the world. A significant amount of the reports about the Sophia Stewart v. Andy Wachowski, etal. case have been sourced to an article headlined "Mother of the Matrix Victorious" by Martha Carter which appeared in the 28 October 2004 issue of GlobeLink.
This article, written by Miss Carter following a personal interview with Sophia Stewart contained some misleading information regarding the current status of the lawsuit. Although a correction was posted within
48 hours, few people read this revised and accurate description of theprogress of the lawsuit. Over 600,000, however, read the erroneous original report and unknown millions more have since read other equally misleading stories based on the GlobeLink story (without correction) that have appeared on literally hundreds of other web sites around the globe.
Readers of the misleading information erroneously concluded that the copyright infringement trial had been held in early October 2004 and that Sophia Stewart's assertions that the "Matrix" and "Terminator" movies were based on her manuscript, "The Third Eye," copyrighted in 1981, and submitted by her in the mid-eighties in response to an ad placed by the Wachowski Brothers, requesting new sci-fi works. In actual fact, the court proceedings in October 2004 simply confirmed that Sophia Stewart appeared to have sufficient merit in her claims (and, by implication, sufficient documentation to substantiate them) to warrant a trial that would establish or refute their validity.

As a result of the June 14, 2005 summary judgment that question will probably never be answered, at least not in an objective forum with established rules of evidence and procedure. Ms. Stewart has given numerous interviews and widely publicized her claims on the Internet and in other media in recent months, but regrettably, she has not provided to the defendants she was suing, or to the court in which she filed her claim, the factual information that would have verified her assertions that she is really the "Mother of the Matrix."

I have to disagree with the writer of this article. It would seem the question was answered when Ms. Stewart refused to produce the "evidence" to support her claims. It reminds me of SCO's slash and burn case against IBM and the creators of Linux. Two years ago SCO screamed from the rooftops that IBM and Linux "ripped-off" their code and that they had proof. Now, two years later they haven't produced one shred of evidence to support their claims.

Paulo Joe Jingy
Sometimes some things just ain't right.

Sophia Stewart

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