Brock Pierce is a pioneering digital currency entrepreneur who has been sued for sexual abuse and fraud, and who lived in a mansion where Bryan Singer allegedly abused an underaged boy. “Completely false,” Pierce said, of the lawsuits. “My view is that these people are only trying to get money.”
Brock Pierce, a digital currency entrepreneur, was elected to the Bitcoin Foundation board of directors on Friday.
Via youtube.com
The foundation, a trade organization that promotes and seeks to standardize the unregulated currency, angered many of its enthusiasts by electing Pierce, a pioneering digital currency entrepreneur who has been sued for sexual abuse and fraud, and who lived in a mansion where embattled X-Men director Bryan Singer allegedly abused underage boys. Pierce vehemently denies any wrongdoing, as does Singer.
His election comes at a time of great turmoil in the world of crypto-currencies.
Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange that once handled 70% of all bitcoin trading, collapsed in February, infuriating investors who said they had lost upward of $450 million. In the space of just a few months, the price of bitcoin has fallen from a high of $1,150 in December of 2013 to its current value of $450.
Recently, Pierce angered bitcoin enthusiasts through his involvement in KnCMiner, a company that sold broken computers to bitcoin miners. Pierce says his involvement with the company is limited, and that the firm is committed to compensating its customers.
The sexual abuse allegations against Pierce, detailed in three lawsuits, date back as far as the late 1990s. But they have resurfaced amid the media firestorm around Singer, who was sued last month in federal court for allegedly sexually abusing an underage man in 1999 and 2000. Pierce lived at an Encino, California, mansion where some of the assaults by Singer allegedly occurred, according to court documents. Pierce is not named in the recent suit, and he denies any involvement in the activities the lawsuits describe. Singer has also denied the allegations.
A former child actor, Pierce helped pioneer the real-world trading of the e-currencies used in massive online games. He has worked with dozens of bitcoin-related firms across the world. In 2007, he was sued for fraud by the co-founder of one of his most successful ventures, Internet Gaming Entertainment, a firm that mined and sold e-currency for use in online games such as World of Warcraft. He settled that suit for an undisclosed amount.
In a telephone interview with BuzzFeed on Saturday, Pierce said that all allegations against him — both those involving sexual assault and fraud — are "absolutely false."
"Anyone can sue anyone for anything, regardless of whether it is true," he said. "My view is that these people are only trying to get money."
The resurfacing of allegations against Pierce has already made waves in the bitcoin community, with several members quitting the foundation in protest upon his election to the board.
The Bitcoin Foundation has already had its share of controversy. Mark Karpelès, the CEO of Mt. Gox, sat on the foundation's board until the day before the exchange shut down. In January, federal prosecutors charged its vice president, Charlie Shrem, with money laundering charges.
The Bitcoin Foundation did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Before becoming interested in bitcoin, Pierce was a co-founder and vice president of Digital Entertainment Network, a pre-YouTube online video company that created its own content.
Via buzzfeed.com
Pierce had just turned 17 years old when he founded DEN in November 1997 with Collins-Rector, an entrepreneur who had made a fortune providing cheap internet access in the early '90s.
Their company sought to compete with television by streaming video content aimed at teenagers and soon attracted millions of dollars from investors. According to reports and court documents, Collins-Rector threw lavish parties at the Encino, California, mansion he shared with Pierce. In a statement, Pierce said that he also maintained an independent residence at the time.
It was at those parties that X-Men director Bryan Singer and several other Hollywood executives, many of whom were DEN investors, allegedly abused former actor Michael Egan, who was underage at the time — according to lawsuits filed in Hawaii federal court last month.
Pierce called Egan "a pathological liar" and told BuzzFeed that he has charter flight records that prove that Singer and the other defendants were never in Hawaii with Egan, as the lawsuit alleges. He said that he could not immediately release those records.
Egan's lawsuit does not name Pierce, but he was named with Collins-Rector as a co-defendant in at least three civil lawsuits filed in Los Angeles in the early 2000s The lawsuits, according to court documents, sought compensation for damages that were a result of sexual abuse. In a statement, Pierce said that all but one of the plaintiffs dropped the cases against him "with no compensation of any kind," and that the remaining one did not do so because his lawyer "would not let him drop" the case.
Pierce also told BuzzFeed over the phone that he finds the resurfacing of those allegations frustrating.
"It's all old news," he said. "The allegations that have been written about are in relation to a company that I co-founded when I was 17. They have been online since then, and anyone who wanted to read about them could have done so. And none of it is true, at least as far as it relates to me. I'm not even gay."
Collins-Rector stepped down as CEO of DEN in October 1999. Soon after he was sued in New Jersey for allegedly sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy from 1993-1996. Pierce also quit his position at DEN and left the United States as the company filed for bankruptcy. The Los Angeles court awarded default judgments in favor of the plaintiffs in the civil lawsuits against them, according to court documents.
Pierce and Collins-Rector were arrested two years later at the Spanish seaside resort of Marbella after a grand jury in Newark indicted Collins-Rector for sex offenses against minors, according to the Associated Press.
Pierce was released without charges, according to the AP.
Collins-Rector spent two years at a Spanish prison before being extradited to the United States, where he was convicted of transporting minors across state lines for the purpose of having sex with them, according to the AP and court documents.
He was released in 2004 and has since disappeared. Pierce told BuzzFeed that he hasn't spoken with Collins-Rector in years, that the man is not involved in any of his businesses in any capacity, and that he does not know anything about his whereabouts.
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