Both February 7, 2023 meetings were recorded, one of them for fifty-seven minutes. Ideal Living learned of Nishizaki’s recording in the last week of February 2025, with trial set for April 21; moved to exclude both; won a probability finding on Spiegel’s declaration on March 25; and settled on April 7. This fall its lawyers sent that declaration to Reckless Ben as the strongest primary evidence of the nine-figure demand.
In the last week of February 2025, with trial set for April 21, Ideal Living learned that the meeting on which its extortion case rests had been recorded by the other person in the room. On March 19 it asked the court to exclude that recording and a second one, of Najar in Spiegel’s office; its motion called the recording a crime under California’s eavesdropping law. On March 25 Judge Valerie Salkin found a substantial probability that the company would prevail on its extortion claim, on Spiegel’s declaration and the company’s exhibits, with a brief and no evidence from Najar. On April 7 the company settled with Najar, who had testified that he had the recordings certified and beside him. The court never ruled on the motion. Asked this fall for its strongest primary evidence of what was said on February 7, 2023, the company’s lawyers sent Reckless Ben the declaration.
The recordingsThe company acts
February 7, 2023. Nishizaki meets Spiegel and records it; Najar enters later with a colleague, who records that too.
September 26, 2023. The company, Spiegel and Williams sue Najar for civil extortion.
October 9, 2024. At his first deposition session, Najar says he has “the recordings certified and sitting right next to me.”
February 7, 2025. Spiegel signs his declaration: an exit package “pegged in the tens of millions,” then “nine figures.”
February 25, 2025. Nishizaki testifies that she recorded her meeting with Spiegel; Najar, in his second session, says her recording runs fifty-seven minutes and that he can hand it over.
March 19, 2025. The company moves to exclude both recordings and any transcript.
March 25, 2025. The court finds a substantial probability the company will prevail on extortion and opens Najar’s finances to discovery; a mediation is set for March 31, with an order to show cause on completing it by April 1.
April 7, 2025. Settlement. Najar bound to “refrain from certain actions through December 31, 2034.”
June 13, 2025. Dismissal, the court keeping jurisdiction to enforce.
September 24, 2025. In federal court the company calls the settlement one with “a confidentiality provision.”
After September 24, 2026. Asked for primary evidence, the company’s lawyers send the declaration. On October 11 Najar says on camera that the settlement made them delete the recordings.
What the company’s own motion says they are.
Plaintiffs request an order to exclude two separate audio recordings of Spiegel that Najar and Nishizaki made without Spiegel’s consent. Recording in such a manner is a crime and the resulting recordings are inadmissible in this proceeding by statute. Cal. Pen. Code § 632(a), (d). In their depositions, both Najar and Nishizaki referred to recordings in their possession of (a) Nishizaki’s long meeting with Spiegel and (b) of Najar’s confrontation with Spiegel and fellow Company executive Helen Christoni, respectively.
Unbeknownst to Spiegel - not only then, but until three weeks ago - Nishizaki recorded this meeting. Despite repeated requests by Plaintiffs’ counsel, Najar has produced neither this recording nor the transcript that Nishizaki allegedly had prepared.
Unbeknownst to Spiegel and Christoni, [the colleague] recorded this meeting, too. Despite repeated requests by Plaintiffs’ counsel, this recording has not been produced, either.
So the company itself told the court three things. Nishizaki recorded her meeting. The employee who came in with Najar recorded his. And the company did not know of the first recording “until three weeks ago,” which from a filing of March 19 means the last week of February 2025, the week she was deposed, with trial set for April 21. The motion did not ask to hear the recordings. It asked the court to exclude them and any transcript, to bar Najar from mentioning them, and it called the prejudice from Nishizaki’s recording “even more manifest” because the company had not known it existed.
Q. And do you recall stating something to the effect that Myra needed to be paid that money or else those allegations would be publicized?
A. Do you want me to give you the recording and show you no? I did not.
Q. Mr. Najar, I’m asking about your recollection. I’m not asking about anything else.
A. I have a recollection of the tape I listened to this morning, and that did not happen.
Q. Yes or no, did you record or have Myra record conversations with Mr. Spiegel knowing California is a two-party consent state? Yes or no? I don’t want to hear why. I want to hear a yes or no.
A. Yes.
He offered the recordings on the record and never produced them; this site set out that failure in September. The company did not argue that the recordings would show a demand. It argued that they should not be heard.
The case settled nineteen days later, and the court never ruled.
The motion was filed on March 19, 2025. The parties settled on April 7. A stipulation under section 664.6 of the Code of Civil Procedure, signed May 30 and filed June 12, keeps the court’s power to enforce the agreement; apart from that and the dismissal, the one term of the settlement it discloses is that Najar must “refrain from certain actions through December 31, 2034.” The case was dismissed without prejudice on June 13. Last September, in the federal filter case, the company’s lawyers described the same settlement as one that “included a confidentiality provision related to proprietary information stemming from Ms. Nishizaki’s employment with Ideal Living.” Whether it says anything about the recordings is not public.
Reckless Ben’s email, the reply, and the declaration it points to.
Your letter says Myra requested an exit package worth tens of millions of dollars and that [Najar] subsequently demanded nine figures, or more than $100 million. Could you please send me the strongest primary-source evidence establishing these demands? If I claim they tried extortion, I want to provide evidence explaining how so the audience can see it for themselves.
The reply, shown at 51:24, is Spiegel’s declaration of February 7, 2025, read on this site in September, with its account of a payment “pegged in the tens of millions of dollars” and of “nine figures”; a page of a hearing transcript; and the lawyers’ own sentence, “Mr. Spiegel has testified as such under penalty of perjury.” Asked for primary evidence of what was said in his office, the company sent the word of the man whose office it was. The court that found a substantial probability of extortion was given the same declaration, the company’s exhibits, and a brief with no evidence from the other side. It was not given the recording, because nobody had produced it, and the company had asked that it be excluded.
A settlement term, by his account, and copies he says were sent out.
So what happens in the settlement? He says, get rid of all the recordings, any recordings that are in your control, that you have. You must delete all the transcripts. They were so panicked about these recordings. And so I deleted mine, Myra deleted hers. But we had sent them, Ben, we had sent them out to so many people at that point. Newsweek had them, LA Times had them, Daily Beast had them.
That is his account and no document supports it. The stipulation says nothing about recordings, and the company’s only public words on them remain the 2025 motion. Reckless Ben ends the segment by asking anyone who holds a copy to send it to him. This site reported in September a Newsweek reporter’s email saying a story was going live; it never ran, and whether that reporter had the recordings is Najar’s claim alone.
Sources. Plaintiffs’ omnibus motions in limine, LASC 23VECV04262, filed March 19, 2025, motion No. 1 at pages 13 to 16 and the background at pages 9 to 10, with excerpts of David Najar’s depositions of October 9, 2024 and February 25, 2025 and of Myra Nishizaki’s deposition attached; the motion to compel of March 11, 2025, with the October 9, 2024 excerpt; the declaration of Peter Spiegel sworn February 7, 2025; the minute order of March 25, 2025, including the mediation and its order to show cause; the stipulation signed May 30, 2025 and the request for dismissal entered June 13, 2025, all linked above. The ex parte application in AirDoctor, LLC v. Lonni, Inc., C.D. Cal. No. 2:23-cv-00353, filed September 24, 2025, at the protective-order report. Reckless Ben’s video, ynmEkCa21-4, published October 11, 2026 at 5:43 p.m. PDT: Najar on the recordings at 46:07 to 50:25, the email and reply at 50:59 to 52:11. The Newsweek emails at the takedown report.
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