According to Rolling Stone reports attorneys for the plaintiffs had filed an “emergency motion to compel production” of Scott’s phone and other devices. In a September 15 hearing, Scott’s attorney, Steve Brody, reportedly said that records from Scott’s manager, David Stromberg, who had “never turned his phone over” for imaging, could be provided by September 27, but acquiring Scott’s phone wouldn’t be so easy. That’s because it “fell off a boat in January of 2022 and landed somewhere at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and cannot be retrieved,” Brody told a judge. He went on to explain that they could not get the messages from Apple or Scott’s phone carrier, either, and Scott had not backed up his phone to iCloud.
“Now, looking back, yeah, in an ideal world, his phone would have been imaged on November 6 or November 7, or 8,” Brody admitted. “Or the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, any time until it fell into the ocean in January of 2022,” added the shocked judge, Kristen Hawkins. Brody went on to acknowledge that “in an ideal situation, that would have happened. It did not.”
Travis was in Mexico in January 2022, two months after the festival. Scott was spotted leaving Cabo San Lucas on January 14, and in an interview around the time, his producer, Wheezy, said Scott had been working on his album Utopia there. Scott’s team had contested previous attempts to acquire his phone, saying it had confidential information and that the request was unreasonable. Scott and others involved with the festival are facing a massive, multi-district litigation combining hundreds of individual suits.
