Ariana Grande has won permission to move more quickly in her effort to identify alleged hackers accused of stealing and leaking unreleased music and private material.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge granted Grande’s request for expedited discovery, allowing her legal team to seek account, subscriber and login information from third-party online platforms without the ordinary waiting period.
Grande’s lawsuit currently names unidentified defendants. Her attorneys argued that the alleged hackers could not be identified without information held by social-media, payment and internet platforms.
The underlying lawsuit, filed in July, accuses unknown individuals of repeatedly accessing digital accounts belonging to people who work with Grande, including photographers and producers, and stealing unreleased songs, photographs, video and audio files.
The ruling does not decide whether the hacking allegations are true and does not identify any defendant. It gives Grande’s lawyers an accelerated path to seek information that could reveal who is behind the anonymous accounts.
Grande’s legal team has argued that speed is important because digital account and login records can be deleted or lost over time.
