Amid a federal lawsuit, a judge says Martin Shkreli must personally go to court and testify under oath about the extent to which he copied and shared Wu-Tang Clan’s rare album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
In a brief ruling Friday (Oct. 11), Judge Pamela K. Chen scheduled a hearing for next month to resolve the issue of what exactly Shkreli did with Once Upon, an ultra-rare Wu-Tang record that he once owned but was forced to forfeit to federal prosecutors after he was convicted of securities fraud.
The judge said the ruling was designed to “resolve the deficiencies” in Shkreli’s previous sworn statements about the fate of the album, in which the pharma exec said he wasn’t sure who might still have copies.
“Defendant Shkreli will be called upon to testify under oath regarding the copying and distribution of the album’s tracks,” the judge wrote. “Both parties will be permitted to question defendant Shkreli on these issues.”
Wu-Tang’s fabled album was recorded in secret and published just once, on a CD secured in an engraved nickel and silver box. In addition to the bizarre trappings, Once Upon came with strict legal stipulations — namely, that the one-of-a-kind album could not be released to the general public until 2103.
In 2015, Shkreli — soon to become infamous as the man who intentionally spiked the price of crucial AIDS medications — bought Once Upon at auction for $2 million. But after he was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, he forfeited it to federal prosecutors to help pay his multi-million dollar restitution sentence. PleasrDAO, a collective of early NFT collectors and digital artists, then bought the album from the government in 2021 for $4 million, and in 2024 acquired the copyrights and other rights for another $750,000.
Amid recent efforts to monetize Once Upon, Pleasr sued Shkreli in June after he made threats to release the album publicly and destroy the exclusivity that the company had purchased. The lawsuit accused him of both breaching the federal forfeiture order and violating federal trade secrets law, which protects valuable proprietary information from misappropriation.
In August, Judge Chen granted Pleasr a preliminary injunction requiring Shkreli to hand over any copies of Once Upon that were still in his possession. Shkreli’s attorneys had argued he had the right to create private copies when he owned the album and could retain them even after he forfeited the original copy, but the judge rejected that argument.
Last month, Shkreli told the judge he had “searched my devices, electronic accounts, and other personal effects” and handed over any copies he owned. He swore that he had done so “under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America.”
But he also said he didn’t know exactly who he had shared it with, and that some of them probably still have copies.
“Because I shared the musical work several times several years ago, I cannot recall each and every time that I have shared the musical work,” he told the judge. “It is possible, and indeed I find it highly likely, that one of the many people who viewed, heard, or otherwise accessed the musical work via my social media recorded the musical work and retains a copy of the same.”
Attorneys for Pleasr weren’t pleased. In a response filing days later, they told the judge that Shkreli’s disclosure “falls short” of the judge’s requirements and “raises doubts as to whether Defendant has, in fact, made a good faith effort to comply.”
On Friday, Judge Chen responded with her order requiring Shkreli to appear in court. His attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday (Oct. 14).