On 10 July 2026, Judge Jill A. Otake ruled on four pre-trial motions in the defamation case Liane Wilson (Liana Shanti) and her company, Life Mastery Network LLC, brought against three defendants (No. 1:25-cv-00297-JAO-RT, D. Haw.). Two of those rulings concerned her allegations of death threats and of stalking (ECF 115).
The death-threat evidence
Wilson alleged that on 19 May 2022 one of the defendants called her phone and left threatening voicemail messages, and she said so publicly on social media. The defendant denies making the calls. The defendants’ motion (ECF 101-1) and a sworn declaration from their counsel (ECF 101-3) set out what happened when they asked to see that evidence.
What the defence told the court
- In December 2023 the defendants formally requested the recordings (Exhibit G, ECF 101-12). The motion states that their discovery requests demanded the recordings along with their metadata — the data that shows when a message was received and from what number.
- Defence counsel wrote to Wilson’s lawyers on 10 June, 29 June and 21 July 2024 asking for the recordings. Two were produced on 23 July 2024, after what the declaration calls “months of prodding and persistent reminders.” The audio itself is not on the public docket; the court file holds placeholder pages for the two files (Exhibits H and I, ECF 101-13, ECF 101-14).
- According to the declaration, the two files were M4A audio files, “not voicemail messages.” Each was less than seven seconds long, both had “electronic-sounding voices,” and neither came with any metadata linking it to Wilson’s phone or to the defendant. The motion described them as “poor-quality recordings.”
- The defendants’ earlier motion to compel in the state court, filed on 16 October 2024, described the two recordings in more detail: “Each was less than 7 seconds long: both had electronic-sounding male voices, one was unintelligible except for the word ‘don’t,’ and the other stating ‘I see you and I will find you’” (Haw. 5th Cir. Ct. No. 5CCV-22-0000107, Dkt. 172, memorandum at 5).
- According to the defence’s sworn declaration in that motion, during meet-and-confer calls on 22 August and 3 September 2024 Wilson’s side initially expressed willingness to produce screenshots of the incoming voicemail messages, and to produce the metadata from her phone “provided that Defendants agreed to pay for the cost of doing so.” On 30 August 2024 her lawyer wrote to defence counsel: “Our client will not pay for a third party to scan her phone for voicemail metadata. If you think you can get your clients to agree to pay for the services we can see if our client will agree” (Dkt. 187, Exhibit 1).
- The declaration states that her side then “would not commit to providing the data regardless of who paid for it,” and that screenshots of the voicemail messages, “which could easily be made without expense, were not provided as promised” (Dkt. 172, Moritz declaration ¶ 27).
- At her deposition on 16 January 2025, Wilson testified that she had got rid of the phone. Asked whether she still had the phone the messages arrived on, she answered: “No. I’m like two phones past that now.” Asked what she does with an old phone, she said she keeps it until her apps work on the new one “and then I toss it” (Exhibit C, ECF 101-8, deposition pp. 36:14–16, 38:4–10).
- A June 2025 discovery response from Wilson said the metadata could not be produced because she no longer had the phone (Exhibit K, ECF 101-16).
- On 31 July 2025 Wilson’s side produced a record showing that she bought a new iPhone on 10 November 2022, less than four weeks before she filed the lawsuit on 6 December 2022 (the same record Wilson later filed herself as part of Exhibit 1, ECF 109-3).
Wilson’s response
In opposition, supported by her own declaration (ECF 109; ECF 109-1), Wilson’s lawyers argued that the recordings were relevant to her defence that her public statement accusing the defendant of making death threats was true, that she had produced all the recordings in her possession, that she did not purposefully destroy evidence, and that “Ms. Shanti routinely replaces old phones with new phones.” They argued that it was for the jury to decide whether the recordings were reliable, and that the motion was procedurally defective and was in substance a late discovery motion.
To support the phone replacement, Wilson attached two records from her Apple account’s “My Support” page (Exhibit 1, ECF 109-3). Both pages display the account name “Liana Shanti” and list an iPhone 14 Pro Max purchased on 10 November 2022 and an iPhone 16 Pro Max purchased on 9 October 2024, each with AppleCare+. Her declaration identifies two recordings, both of voicemails she says she received on her own phone on 19 May 2022 (ECF 109-1, ¶¶ 2–3). In her declaration she stated that she could not locate the old phone and so could not retrieve the recordings’ metadata, and that she had earlier “retrieved copies of the audio recordings of the threats from my old phone by downloading the voicemails” in order to send them to the FBI.
The ruling
The court granted the motion, finding that an exclusionary sanction under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e) — the rule on failure to preserve electronically stored information — was warranted. The court’s minutes state that Wilson “should have preserved the actual voicemail with its metadata in anticipation or conduct of litigation” (ECF 115).
The ruling is a sanction for failing to preserve evidence. It is not a finding about whether the threats occurred. The court added that if the defendants pursued their counterclaim over Wilson’s statement that one of them had made death threats, she could ask the court to revisit the issue.
The stalking allegations
The defendants also moved to exclude testimony about alleged stalking, on the same ground of spoliation. The court granted that motion, and the minutes record that Wilson did not oppose it.
Without prejudice
The court stated that its rulings on these motions were without prejudice and could be revisited during trial depending on how the evidence was presented. The trial began on 3 August 2026, and the jury returned its verdicts on 13 August 2026.
Federal court documents linked here are hosted by CourtListener, the Free Law Project’s public court-records archive. The Hawai‘i state-court filings (No. 5CCV-22-0000107), which are not on CourtListener, link to copies in our legal library.