A newly unsealed court filing in WP Engine’s ongoing legal battle with Automattic has revealed CEO Matt Mullenweg’s phone wasn’t forensically copied until nine months after Automattic’s obligation to preserve evidence began, and when it was copied, none of his WhatsApp or Signal messages were captured. And two other devices that might have held the same messages have gone missing — Mullenweg lost a phone while traveling, and he doesn’t know the whereabouts of a laptop.
Last month, WP Engine asked the U.S. District Court to sanction Automattic and Mullenweg in a motion alleging they destroyed evidence and repeatedly misrepresented their efforts to preserve it. The hosting company wants the court to instruct the jury to presume the lost messages would have supported its interference, defamation, and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claims. WP Engine also wants the court to dismiss Automattic’s seven trademark counterclaims outright.
WP Engine filed the motion on July 28 and many of the specific allegations were redacted. But those details became public last week after Automattic consented to unsealing sections about evidence preservation, while asking the court to keep passages about its internal trademark licensing and pricing strategy under seal.
Much of the new detail comes from a sworn declaration by Jonathan Robins, who works for Automattic’s e-discovery firm. According to Robins, the first imaging of any of Mullenweg’s devices happened on April 17, 2025, nine months after Automattic’s obligation to preserve evidence began, six months after WP Engine filed suit, and two weeks after Automattic told WP Engine’s legal team in writing that it had “taken all reasonable steps to preserve relevant documents in this case, including with respect to Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp.”
But according to Robins, the first imaging didn’t work because Mullenweg’s phone had been updated to a new version of iOS and the e-discovery firm’s software didn’t yet support it. He was only able to make a “logical” image of the phone, which didn’t include the encrypted data needed for WhatsApp or Signal.
It then took another 11 months to try again. A second copy on March 16, 2026, finally captured the data needed to decrypt the two messaging accounts. The total gap between the preservation duty coming into play and the successful capture was 20 months. WP Engine claims neither Automattic nor Robins has explained why it took so long.
WP Engine’s motion quotes from Mullenweg’s deposition testimony to make that point, and those passages are among the sections now unsealed. Asked why it took “almost a full year” to re-copy his phone, Mullenweg answered: “I don’t know.” Asked how many disappearing messages he’d received during the 11-month gap, he said he didn’t know. When WP Engine’s lawyer pressed further, saying “And no one will ever know; right?” Mullenweg responded: “I — I don’t recollect, no.”
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Neither of Mullenweg’s other two personal devices, a Pixel Fold phone and a MacBook laptop, was forensically imaged before they went missing, and Mullenweg conceded that disappeared messages “wouldn’t be transferred” to a new device anyway.
WP Engine also alleges Automattic misrepresented its preservation efforts to the court itself. In an October 6, 2025 joint letter brief, Automattic told the court that Mullenweg’s “responsive Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp communications have been preserved.” WP Engine claims that representation was false, given that Robins’s own account puts the successful capture of WhatsApp and Signal data five months later.
In a May 5 declaration, Mullenweg admitted he had used disappearing messages on all three platforms, but said it was only for “highly sensitive personal communications with romantic partners.” WP Engine alleges that contradicted what Automattic’s lawyers had told them 13 months earlier, that Mullenweg “has not activated the auto-delete function on any communications platform with auto-delete capability that he uses.”
Mullenweg has previously rejected the allegations, characterizing the spoliation claims as an attempt to “make it seem like I am hiding or destroying evidence because we rotate logs on wordpress.org or I have disappearing chats on Signal with romantic partners.”
Automattic has previously rejected WP Engine’s sanctions motion, telling The Repository, “WP Engine’s case has collapsed. Knowing they can’t win on the merits, they’ve filed a motion based on mischaracterizations and baseless speculation to distract from a losing hand. We look forward to filing our response and are confident this motion will fail.”
The unsealed filings also add to the timeline of what Automattic knew and when. A newly public Slack exchange shows Mullenweg telling Automattic’s Woo leadership on August 15, 2024, more than a month before Automattic took its dispute with WP Engine public, that “I know we’re now going [on] a litigation track with WPE.”
And a separate, partly redacted transcript of Jesse Friedman’s January 2026 deposition, also filed with the court, refers to the “carrot and stick” language at the center of WP Engine’s claim that Automattic planned to “steal every single WP site” from hosts that refused trademark deals. Friedman, the company’s Head of WP Cloud and Vice President of Innovation and Partnership Success, said he had a “vague memory” of the phrase being used internally and resisted the idea that a “stick” meant a threat, describing it instead as “motivation.” According to the transcript, when WP Engine’s counsel suggested that it sounded like beating the horse, he pushed back. “There are jockeys that use sticks to motivate the horse to go faster,” Friedman said. “I don’t know that I would necessarily classify it as beating the horse.”
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The sanctions motion is scheduled for a hearing before Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan on September 30, 2026, and the court is still weighing both sides’ motions to dismiss after hearing arguments in June. A 10-day jury trial is scheduled for October 2027.
Disclosure: WP Engine and Automattic-owned Pressable are sponsors of The Repository.