After WonderWork was forced into bankruptcy by Wang’s lawyers, my team and I worked overtime for an entire year trying to save our charity.
We had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy which is designed to give businesses the chance to reorganize and exit bankruptcy. I fully expected this to happen because we never should’ve been there in the first place. We had almost $22 million in the bank when we were forced into bankruptcy. We had just finished our best year ever, we had more than 250,000 donors supporting us including half a dozen billionaire donors.
We could have easily exited bankruptcy, restarted our fundraising, our surgery programs and resumed our rapid growth. While in bankruptcy I raised millions from donors who wanted to help us get back on our feet.
The only problem was, even after we filed for bankruptcy, Wang’s lawyers continued to be paid millions of dollars to force us out of business.
We fought as long and as hard as we could but, after about a year of this, we could not fend them off any longer. I was forced to resign, and WonderWork was put in the control of trustee to close it down.
After this happened, Wang’s lawyers persuaded the judge to put them in charge of the WonderWork Litigation Trust. This meant they were now supposed to be in charge of “protecting” WonderWork – after nearly a decade of trying to destroy WonderWork.
But what it really meant was another opportunity for Wang’s lawyers, who had already been paid tens of millions of dollars, to make even more money. Wang’s lawyers filed million-dollar federal lawsuits against me, my CFO, every member of my Board of Directors and our auditors, KPMG.
These lawsuits, like every other lawsuit that Wang’s lawyers brought against, were based entirely on lies and false allegations.
The big difference this time is that Wang’s lawyers are now in front of a very smart, very experienced federal judge and it is not going well for them.
Almost a year has gone by since Wang’s lawyers filed these lawsuits and requested jury trials and yet no trial dates have been set. No discovery has been allowed. And the judge seems to be losing patience with Wang’s lawyers as he just dismissed the majority of charges.
All of us are cautiously optimistic that these baseless, vindictive lawsuits will soon be dismissed and it will end 10+ years of senseless litigation. Litigation that generated $25+ million worth of legal fees for Wang’s lawyers and 100% of them were paid for by charities.