Ideal Living Asked a Federal Judge to Keep Myra Nishizaki From Testifying. The Judge Said No.

In a federal suit over knockoff air filters, AirDoctor and Ideal Living Management moved on September 24, 2025 to block a subpoena for Myra Nishizaki’s deposition. To do it, the company’s lawyers put two things on the record: that all three cases involving her and David Najar were settled together in April 2025 under a confidentiality clause, and that the company had been restructured in July 2025 around an investor its own witness could not name. Two days later the court denied the motion.

AirDoctor, LLC sued Lonni, Inc. and several Chinese companies in January 2023 for selling “replacement” filters for its purifiers. The case has nothing to do with the temple. It became relevant on September 2, 2025, when the defendants served a subpoena on Nishizaki, the company’s former senior brand manager, for a deposition on two topics: the financial and corporate relationship between Ideal Living and its affiliates, and the paragraphs of her own 2023 complaint about the founders’ religious organization. The company’s attempt to stop that deposition is the most candid account it has given of how the cases against her ended and of who owns it now.

What the company told the court

The application, filed by AirDoctor’s counsel “for Plaintiff and Non-party Ideal Living Management LLC,” calls Nishizaki’s 2023 suit a lawsuit built on “unfounded allegations” that “the company and its founders were improperly affiliated with a religious ‘cult’ organization engaged in criminal conduct,” and says that “as a consequence of her accusations and actions of her boyfriend, David Najar,” the company and its founders “were forced to file a complaint against Mr. Najar for extortion and harassment.” Then it says how it all ended: “In April 2025, the parties in the Nishizaki Lawsuit, the Najar Lawsuit and the Restraining Order Proceeding reached a settlement agreement, which included a confidentiality provision related to proprietary information stemming from Ms. Nishizaki’s employment with Ideal Living.” The Najar stipulation this site hosts dates that agreement April 7, 2025, thirteen days after a judge ordered Najar to open his finances. The dismissals of June 2025 were the paperwork.

The application’s second argument is that Nishizaki cannot know the company’s current structure because “Plaintiff, Ideal Living and its related companies went through a corporate restructuring in July 2025.” Carlton Newsome, the human-resources manager she sued in 2023, filed a declaration that she was employed “until February 2023” and had signed a confidentiality agreement “in or about June 2011.” The day before filing, counsel had offered the defendants a trade: withdraw the subpoena and the company would produce “an additional 30(b)(6) witness from Plaintiff’s accounting department for a half-day” on its financial and corporate structure.

What its own witness said

The reason that offer was on the table is in the defendants’ opposition. On September 3, 2025, the day after the subpoena, the defendants had deposed Jeremy Sweet, AirDoctor’s designated witness on corporate structure and, by his own description, its director of business and legal affairs. Asked whether Ideal Living Holdings, LLC owns all of Ideal Living, LLC, he answered: “Recently they did have a third-party investor interest, a minority share that now owns a portion of it, I don’t know all the details, but I know there was, in the last -- maybe in July, a new entity that bought in.” Asked the entity’s name: “Hmm, I don’t remember. I’d have to look.” It came in “at the holdings, I think,” and “they created an LLC or two at the holdings level, as well.” The next morning the company’s lawyer wrote to the defendants that “in light of Mr. Sweet’s testimony yesterday that there was a very recent change in Plaintiff’s corporate structure, Plaintiff seeks to file a Second Amended Complaint to add the new parent companies as Plaintiffs.”

The defendants’ lawyer told the court that Sweet “repudiated his own sworn RFA answers, stating that he was told to answer them that way,” and that the company’s witnesses could not explain “the corporate relationship between Plaintiff and its broad range of affiliates.” The court granted leave to amend on October 20, 2025. The Second Amended Complaint of October 24 and the Third Amended Complaint of December 10, 2025 name one plaintiff, AirDoctor, LLC. The new parent companies were never added. The defendants’ amended counterclaims of December 10, 2025 name, as counter-defendants, AirDoctor, Ideal Living, LLC, Response Products, LLC doing business as Ideal Living Direct, Ideal Living Management LLC, and “Ideal Living Holdings, LLC,” which they plead is “the parent company of Ideal Living Management, LLC and AirDoctor.”

The ruling

On September 26, 2025, Magistrate Judge Alka Sagar denied the application in chambers. The company had shown no irreparable prejudice, had “waited almost three weeks after the subpoena was issued,” lacked standing to quash a subpoena to a third party, and “failed to make any credible showing that the information sought from the witness is privileged and/or why the protective order issued in this case cannot safeguard the dissemination of information that is confidential.” The deposition was set for September 29, 2025. Whether it went forward is not in the free record; the entries that would say are behind the court’s paywall.

What the restructuring was

Sweet could not name the entity. The public record can describe the transaction. On July 11, 2025, five Delaware companies, Ideal Living, LLC, AirDoctor, LLC, Aqua Tru, LLC, Ionic Pro, LLC and Therabotanics, LLC, granted JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., “as Administrative Agent for the Secured Parties,” a security interest in every trademark and patent they own, forty-four marks and forty-three patents, under “a Credit Agreement dated as of July 11, 2025” whose borrower is a company formed sixteen days earlier, Ideal Living Intermediate II, LLC. Peter Spiegel signed every grant as “Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-President.” Katie Williams appears on none of them. Palm Beach Capital, a West Palm Beach private-equity firm, listed Ideal Living on its portfolio page with “Date of Investment: 07/11/2025”; the page has since been taken down, and its managing partner’s biography now names Ideal Living among his board seats. The company’s own witness calls the stake a minority share. Nothing public says how large it is, or how much the founders were paid.

What is left

Two things the company would rather have kept out of a filter case are now in one. The three proceedings that ended the whistleblower’s and Najar’s cases were one settlement, in April 2025, with a confidentiality clause. And the company that sued Najar for threatening to expose “the true ownership and control” of Ideal Living was, by the summer of 2025, unable to tell a federal court who its new owner was.

What the settlement cost the other side is on the record too, in her words. In Reckless Ben’s video of August 27, 2026, at 10:28, Nishizaki says: “My credit has been destroyed. My car was repossessed last month. I have nothing. I’m working multiple jobs and I can’t keep up with the debt, because I took on a lot of debt to try to survive this.” Earlier in the same video she says, “We didn’t have money to fight back. So, they bullied us,” and Najar describes a neutral telling the two of them, “The legal system is not fair. It’s based on money. And I see billions of dollars in that room and I don’t see billions of dollars in this room. Just get out of it.” Some accounts of the video attribute the credit and car lines to Najar; a voice comparison against each speaker’s other passages in the same video puts them in Nishizaki’s voice.

Sources. The nine documents above; the docket of AirDoctor, LLC v. Lonni, Inc., C.D. Cal. No. 2:23-cv-00353-GW-AS, via the RECAP archive; the Delaware Division of Corporations for Ideal Living Intermediate II, LLC (formed June 25, 2025); Palm Beach Capital’s portfolio page as captured June 18, 2026 and its team page as of August 31, 2026; the Najar settlement stipulation hosted in The Record Does Not Need the Witnesses. Every hosted document is indexed in the evidence vault.

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