Disclaimer: I used an LLM (GLM-5.3) to perform this summarization of the recently released transcript.

TL;DR: Yesterday (Aug 19) the court held a hearing on Jane Doe's spoliation-sanctions motion against Steven "Destiny" Bonnell under FRCP 37(e)(2). Today the judge ordered her supporting record onto the public docket — including Destiny's previously confidential deposition transcript from April 2026. That transcript contains his first public, under-oath admissions about what he deleted and when, right before the intimate video leaked. That's the story of this week's filing.

The events

• Aug 19: Hearing on the Rule 37(e)(2) sanctions motion (ECF 262) for spoliation of evidence. The court told plaintiff's counsel to file the evidentiary record.
• Aug 20: Dkt 293 hits the docket — the deposition transcript, a digital-forensics expert report (Jesus Pena), and all three sets of Destiny's responses to document requests.

The newly public deposition admissions

These were sworn in April but secret until today:

• The deletion window: Between the Nov 20, 2024 partial leak of his DMs and the Nov 29, 2024 Kiwi Farms leak, he deleted all media exchanged with Recipient A on Discord — including the video at issue. His wording: he's "pretty sure" he deleted it "the day I saw that the account was leaking messages." That's the centerpiece fact for the intent-to-deprive element: destroying the exact material, right before it leaked, while being actively extorted.
• Redact.dev: He admitted using the mass-deletion/archival tool on his Discord messages, including his thread with Recipient B at "the end of 2024" — after the leak. Notably, he had previously refused to answer any discovery questions about Redact.dev.
• No preservation effort: No litigation hold (testified he doesn't know what one is), none on his own website's chat logs, no forensic imaging, no hash values (called them "meaningless"). His "preservation" was ad hoc: Discord's one-sided CSV export, a third-party exporter tool, Redact, and screenshots. YouTube archives were just made private.
• The denial, narrowed: His lawyer's four-question cross got clean denials — nothing permanently deleted since the Jan 22, 2025 preservation demand, everything responsive produced. But on redirect, plaintiff's counsel pinned him down: he deleted some threads but not others, and communications with several other people (a woman whose chats were requested, plus several streamers/commentators) were never produced — either "not responsive" or no longer in his possession.
• Color: He admitted posting details of Jane Doe's deposition to his own chat the same day it was designated confidential; his answers to her about who'd seen the video were hedged ("pretty sure," "don't think so") rather than certain; and he confirmed offering her unspecified financial help in Dec 2024 and losing a ~$20K sponsorship after her public essay.

The expert report (now public)

Pena's conclusions: the video sat at a permanent, publicly reachable Discord CDN URL — findable by search engines — from April 2022 until Discord killed permanent links in Dec 2023, which matters because the federal intimate-images statute (15 U.S.C. § 6851) took effect Oct 1, 2022. It stayed on Discord's servers, accessible to Recipient A, until Destiny deleted it after the Nov 29, 2024 leak. On spoliation: no forensic hashes ever generated, his production lost message timestamps in an HTML-to-PDF conversion, and his "media I sent to Recipient B" spreadsheet contains URLs and timestamps that don't match the recipients' own chat logs.

The discovery responses (now public)

In Sept 2025 he swore under oath that the Google Drive links he allegedly sent recipients "never existed" — while testifying in April that he sent Drive links over Discord as a matter of course. And on Dec 16, 2025 (the discovery deadline itself) he blanket-refused to answer anything about Redact.dev usage, call logs, or communications with various commentators as "untimely."

Why it matters

The core dispute is now fully framed: plaintiff says targeted destruction during a foreseeable-litigation window plus unverifiable productions; Destiny says everything pre-dates the preservation letter and everything responsive was produced. The record the court needs to decide "intent to deprive" — or set an evidentiary hearing — was filed this morning.

This record puts Destiny in serious but not fatal jeopardy: the deletion window predates the preservation letter, but deleting the exact media at issue mid-extortion-crisis is the classic fact pattern for an adverse-inference instruction — realistically sanctions and a crippled defense rather than the nuclear default judgment. Combined with the expert finding that the video stayed publicly accessible after the statute took effect, the trajectory points toward him surviving case-termination but losing the case itself.