Former minor leaguer Neiman Nix filed a lawsuit on Thursday suing Major League Baseball, Commissioner Rob Manfred and former Commissioner Bud Selig for misconduct during its Biogenesis investigation in 2013.
Just when you thought all things Biogenesis were in the past, along comes former 29th-round draft pick Neiman Nix, the man who ran a clinic in South Beach called DNA Sports Lab, with a new lawsuit which alleges that “an MLB investigator misrepresented herself as law enforcement and MLB intimidated the company’s clients and hacked accounts on YouTube, Facebook and PayPal.”
MLB released a statement calling the lawsuit frivolous:
"“Mr. White’s purported source for this lawsuit is a disgruntled former MLB employee who was terminated for cause. Mr. White has been threatening to file this lawsuit for months in an attempt to coerce MLB into paying his client. MLB considers the allegations in this lawsuit, including the allegations relating to the hacking of DNA Sport Lab’s social media accounts, to be sanctionable under New York law.”"
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This isn’t the first time Nix has filed a lawsuit against Major League Baseball. He filed a similar suit against MLB, Major League Baseball Properties, Major League Baseball Enterprises, Commissioner Bud Selig and MLB investigator Awilda Santana in February 2014. That suit was dismissed on November 6, 2014, after Circuit Judge John W. Thornton claimed the plaintiffs (Nix and the clinic) and their lawyers “never served the suit on the defendants and failed to show up for scheduled case management conferences.”
Nix is being represented by Vincent White, who also represents former Mets closer Jenrry Mejia, who tested positive for PEDs a third time in February and who was banned from MLB for life. Mejia is not involved with this lawsuit.
White said that the previous case, “wasn’t ripe [at that time],” and added that the “cooperation of the investigators we have today makes or breaks this matter.” The investigators, Dan Mullin, Ed Dominguez, and George Hanna, were all a part of the original Biogenesis case and were dismissed by MLB when it wanted to “restructure” its investigative team.
Dominguez figures to be a key player in the current lawsuit, and according to White, will testify that MLB “illegally gained access to electronic accounts of individuals they investigated through various exploits and phishing schemes. We believe these tactics may have extended to players, team staff and ownership groups.”
VICE Sports obtained a copy of the complaint and published an article yesterday afternoon which reported that “Nix alleges that Major League Baseball’s investigators threatened him with criminal charges, spread false allegations about his businesses, represented themselves as DEA and FBI agents, hacked into his company’s social media accounts and then had them taken down, and accused him of selling performance-enhancing drugs to major league players.”
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From the beginning of the Biogenesis kerfuffle, outside observers noted that MLB and its investigators may have overstepped their authority and also may have obtained evidence against the players involved in the investigation illegally. White and Nix are claiming this to be true and with one of the lead investigators involved in the original case on their side and willing to talk, this case is far from over.