The extortion case never reached a jury. It reached two judges, and it put David Najar under oath twice. What they found, what he conceded, and what both sides agreed a jury should never hear.
Peter Spiegel, Katie Williams and Ideal Living sued David Najar in September 2023 over an anonymous email campaign that threatened to publish a “documentary” about the temple, and over a demand for money made in Spiegel’s office that February. The case settled in June 2025 without a verdict. It did not end without findings. Two judges ruled on the evidence along the way, Najar sat for two depositions, and in the month before trial both sides told the court what they wanted kept from the jury. The temple was on that list.
The first came at the restraining-order hearing. In January 2024, after a four-day hearing at which Najar testified and was cross-examined, Judge Karen Moskowitz granted Spiegel, the petitioner, a three-year civil harassment restraining order against Najar, with Williams listed on it as a protected person. The standard for such an order is clear and convincing evidence, and her reasons are on the transcript. She found that Najar had engaged in “a course of conduct that constitutes unlawful harassment,” namely “voicemails, texts, emails, and at least one personal meeting where you conducted yourself in a threatening and offensive manner,” and that although he had “apparently” used “some sort of program to disguise who they were coming from,” at least two of the anonymous emails carried “enough indicia” for “any reasonable person to conclude that they came from you, including your phone number.”
The second came fourteen months later, on a motion Najar opposed with a brief and no evidence. California lets a plaintiff examine a defendant’s finances before trial only if a judge first finds a substantial probability that punitive damages will be awarded. On March 25, 2025, Judge Valerie Salkin made that finding. The plaintiffs had shown “a prima facie case for civil extortion,” she wrote; Najar’s conduct, “if proven, is plainly malicious and despicable”; and he “submits no evidence in opposition.” She ordered him to disclose his net worth and business interests and, the same day, ordered Charter Communications to identify the internet subscriber behind the anonymous accounts.
Neither ruling is a verdict. One is a protective order on a heightened civil standard; the other is a probability finding on a one-sided record. They are the only judicial words in the case, and both point the same way.
Najar was deposed in October 2024 and again in February 2025. He denied writing any of the emails. He did not deny the campaign. Asked whether he had worked with others to send them, he said yes. He named one collaborator, a neighbor of Spiegel’s, and refused to name the rest: “The other people are afraid of being sued or harassed by Peter Spiegel.” The emails, he testified, were generated by code, from a repository fed with prompts by a team he was “not a part of,” and the anonymous account that listed his phone number as its recovery line did so, he said, because he lets people he would not name use his email address, his phone number and his home internet.
On the demand he was plainer. Spiegel’s declaration says Najar came into his office on February 7, 2023 and said that unless Nishizaki was paid “nine figures,” the two of them would carry out her threat. Under oath, Najar did not dispute the number. Asked about his earlier claim that a lawyer had advised the figure, he answered: “You know what you do when you are faced with the head of a global child sex cult, you try to scare them a little bit, but you do it with money because Peter is about money.” No lawyer was involved, he went on: “We didn’t talk to an attorney to make that decision. I’ve run this whole thing, me.” Asked why nine figures: “Because Peter likes to say ‘nine figures’ a lot. He’s Mr. Nine figures.”
He also testified that the meetings that day were secretly recorded, one of them for fifty-seven minutes, that he knew California requires both parties’ consent, that “the recordings are damning,” and that he had them “certified and sitting right next to me.” He produced none of them, and no other document, in the case. Myra Nishizaki, deposed the same afternoon, testified that she had recorded her own meeting with Spiegel, that “he’s the one who suggested an exit package” and “asked me for a number,” and that she never gave one.
A month before the April 2025 trial date, Spiegel’s lawyers filed five motions in limine. Read together they describe the case they intended to try: an extortion case with the temple taken out of it.
The second motion asked the court to bar any evidence of Spiegel and Williams’s religious affiliation and to forbid the words “cult” and “child sex cult.” This case, the brief says, “is not about a convicted cleric who skipped bail after his conviction for sex crimes 15 years ago in Texas.” It then lists the questions a jury must not be asked. “Did a part-time consultant of the Company assist the cleric’s flight from justice? Is Spiegel building what Najar calls an ‘ashram’ or rather a Hindu meditation center in his backyard? … Are Spiegel and fellow Plaintiff Katie Williams on the board of a local religious group? Is that group affiliated with a particular Hindu group in India? It does not matter.” Under California law, the brief notes, truth is no defense to extortion, so “the truth or falsity of Najar’s allegations is completely irrelevant.”
The third motion asked to exclude evidence of the parties’ wealth, which it defines to include “the amount of the bond that Spiegel forfeited in Texas and the cost/size of the meditation center being built in Tarzana.” The first asked to keep out the secret recordings. Elsewhere the brief calls the guru “a long-dead cleric.”
The motions were advocacy, and the court never ruled on them. But it is Spiegel’s own lawyers who put three things on the record in their own words: that the person alleged to have helped the guru leave the country was a consultant to the company, that Spiegel forfeited a bond in Texas, and that the building in Tarzana is a meditation center he is building. Najar filed one motion of his own, to keep out a lawsuit from 2001. The two sides disagreed about what the jury should hear about him. About the temple they agreed: nothing.
Najar’s motion asked the court to exclude “the 2001 lawsuit Graham v. Sisters of Providence in California, et al.,” in which, it says, he “was named as a Defendant and accused by a former student of causing emotional distress, assault and related claims.” He denies the allegations, was never found liable, and “does not recall even having been served.” He had been cross-examined about the suit at the restraining-order hearing, which is why the motion exists. The suit did not end in a finding. It ended in a payment: on May 10, 2002 the Los Angeles Times reported that the order of nuns that runs the school “has paid an undisclosed amount of money” to the former student, who alleged “she and the male teacher began a sexual relationship just before her 18th birthday,” and that her lawyer had filed two weeks earlier to dismiss the negligence complaint against the order. The docket lists two defendants, the order and Najar; court indexes also carry a second case under the same caption, EC034373, from about 2001, whose contents are not online. The Times did not name the teacher; Najar’s own motion says he was the one accused. The former student is a private person, and nothing beyond the report and his summary is repeated here.
Settled, at the standards described above: that Najar sent at least two of the emails, that the plaintiffs made out a case of extortion he did not contest, and that he demanded a nine-figure sum to “scare” a man he calls the head of a cult. Not settled: who the others were, what fifty-seven minutes of tape contain, what the April 7, 2025 settlement required beyond that Najar “refrain from certain actions through December 31, 2034,” and the question both sides agreed no jury should reach, whether anything the emails threatened to publish was true.
This update follows Peter Spiegel’s Sworn Account of the Extortion Case and What Peter Spiegel Told the Police. Every hosted filing is indexed in the evidence vault.
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