Google ‘founder’ admits he created revenge site against estranged wife
In 2018, Google shirked off its unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil.” Maybe that was a sign.
Scott Hassan, 51, who wrote much of the original code that powers the search giant, is embroiled in a nasty divorce battle that has raged for seven years and involves millions of dollars, claims of treating his children unfairly — and even a shocking online revenge campaign.
His ex wife, Allison Huynh, a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s robotics laboratory, claims Hassan is withholding a fortune that her attorney claims she is legally entitled to.
“In 2018, the [couple’s] estate was valued at $1.8 billion and [Hassan] wanted to give her a minuscule fraction,” Huynh’s attorney Pierce O’Donnell claimed in a statement to The Post. “His court position is that she gets nothing: Zero, zip, nada. Every settlement conference, he’s reduced his offer. I haven’t seen that in my 45-year-long career. He’s trying to pull off the ultimate dirty trick on his wife and three teenage children.”
Hassan told The Post that suggestions that he doesn’t want to give her his ex and children any assets are “not accurate.”
A genius at robotics, Hassan is characterized as a high-tech Dr. Dolittle who can talk to computers. Although he was never an employee of Google, Hassan’s remarkable early contributions mean he is known as the company’s unofficial third founder, along with Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Before he and Huynh wed in 2001, he obtained the right to cheaply purchase shares in the company, which, today, would be worth billions of dollars.
But as divorce settlement proceedings are scheduled to start Monday in San Jose, Calif., Hassan is embroiled in a much less prestigious online endeavor.
After being accused by his ex, he has admitted to launching the site AllisonHuynh.com earlier this year, seeding it with links to positive articles written about his ex — but also links to court documents from three embarrassing lawsuits that involve her.
“Scott was trying to bully me into dropping my [fight for assets] and accepting a pittance,” Huynh told The Post.
Asked if he put up the site, Hassan admitted to The Post: “I did, but I have taken it down. It came together in a moment of frustration, when I felt Allison and her attorney were telling one-sided stories to the press. I thought aggregating publicly available information without commenting or editorializing would help … It only ended up making our dispute more public and tense, which was never what I intended.”
Among the documents posted are pages related to a cross complaint to Huynh’s wrongful termination suit against her former employer Samuel Ockman and Penguin Computing — including allegations that Huynh “crawled under” Ockman’s desk “and performed oral sex on him.” The documents, filed by Ockman and his attorney in response to Huynh’s 2000 suit, also claim she “threatened that if Ockman ever left her she would kill him and then herself” and “kept track of when Ockman was out with a new girlfriend.”
https://nypost.com/2021/08/20/google-founder-created-revenge-site-against-estranged-wife/