A status conference hearing in the Johnson v. Zuffa and Davis v. Zuffa antitrust cases took place in Las Vegas, and it produced a rough afternoon for the defense. The hearing before Judge Boulware ran roughly four hours and opened with a revelation that caught the courtroom’s attention: Dana White had been using a previously undisclosed phone number for years.
According to sources who attended the hearing in person, the defense had filed a response prior to the hearing acknowledging the existence of a phone number tied to White that had never been disclosed. The number surfaced after other TKO executives handed over material during discovery, revealing text exchanges with White, including messages such as “hey it’s Dana.”
The number appears to have been used with executives Craig Borsari and Hunter Campbell for at least four years, with material potentially dating back to 2018 or 2019 and possibly as recent as 2024.
The defense argued the number had technically been disclosed because it appeared somewhere within the discovery documents. The plaintiffs countered that they had to search through the material themselves to identify it as White’s number. The source noted the judge did not treat the phone issue with heavy emotion, focusing instead on fact-finding questions such as whether the phone had been imaged, whether it was White’s personal device, what the carrier records would show, and why it had not been previously disclosed. The judge ordered an update on the matter within a week.
The phone issue folded into the unresolved spoliation dispute that has lingered for roughly a year. The judge grew visibly frustrated with the defense’s proposal for handling expert analysis of the evidence, calling a 20 page submission mostly irrelevant and rejecting the defense’s request for another 12 to 24 months to redo forensic work after expert Eric Whedon’s original testimony was struck. The judge said the client bears responsibility for failing to preserve material despite a litigation hold dating back roughly four years to Lee v. Zuffa.
Attorneys representing Endeavor separately raised the possibility of a default judgment against the defendants under Rule 37, prompting the judge to confirm that such a ruling would require an extraordinary threshold, though he did not rule out the possibility. He also emphasized that missing messages matter significantly, pointing to a previously revealed message in which White told Lorenzo Fertitta they needed to “choke them out” and deny competitors “oxygen” regarding Gilbert Melendez’s move to Bellator.
No formal ruling was issued on spoliation, but Judge Boulware indicated a timeline decision would not extend past the end of the year.
