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Snap was sued earlier this month by a former employee claiming the company lied about its user growth to investors.
Now Snap is pushing back, claiming that the former employee, Anthony Pompliano, is not only lying about Snap’s growth, but violated his employment contract with the company by filing the lawsuit at all.
Snap filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday asking that the court force Pompliano back into private arbitration, where the two sides have been hashing out his wrongful termination claims in private since July.
More importantly, Snap reiterated that Pompliano’s claims — that it was “falsely representing” its growth metrics to those outside the company — are not true, and that his lawsuit is “all about publicity.”
“His allegations against Snap are false from top to bottom and right out of his allege-fraud-against-former-employers handbook,” Snap’s petition reads. (We don’t know what metrics, specifically, Pompliano claimed were inaccurate, as most of his original lawsuit had been redacted. He was a member of Snap’s growth team and was terminated after just three weeks on the job.)
Snap also said Pompliano’s claims that the company waged “a smear campaign” against him after he was fired and kept him from finding other employment were also false. Snap says Pompliano was hired by Brighten Labs after his three-week stint at Snap, then was fired there and subsequently sued that company, too.
Emails sent to Pompliano’s attorneys and Brighten Labs were not immediately returned.
It seems clear that Snap won’t settle with Pompliano. Snap is on the brink of an IPO, and its growth prospects will be a huge selling point to possible investors. The company can’t really afford for outsiders to question its growth trajectory.
Snap currently claims 150 million daily active users.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
