The Civic Node

Doe v. Bonnell Continuance Motion (ECF 227)

5 min read

Original PDF (RECAP archive via CourtListener) · 7 pages · filed April 8, 2026

Summary

Plaintiff’s verified motion to continue the May 18, 2026 trial date in Doe v. Bonnell (1-25-cv-20757). Asserts the case is not trial-ready because Bonnell has not been deposed (his deposition was stayed November 5, 2025 by ECF 167), multiple dispositive and discovery motions remain unresolved, the foreign deposition authorized by Doe v Bonnell Hague motion (ECF 145) is pending, and potential spoliation requires further motion practice. Hearing set for April 21, 2026.

⚠️ Correction (2026-04-19): Earlier versions of this page asserted that the pending letter rogatory was “almost certainly directed at Solo in the UK.” That reading was wrong. The only foreign-discovery motion in the docket is Doe v Bonnell Hague motion (ECF 145), filed October 7, 2025, which targets Bonnell’s ex-wife Melina Göransson in Sweden, not Solo in the UK. This page previously treated the letter rogatory and the Göransson deposition as two separate things; they are the same thing. Corrections applied throughout. The “Newsletter Angles” narrative about the Hague mechanism being used against Solo has been rewritten to reflect what the record actually contains.

Key Points

  • Trial set: two-week period beginning May 18, 2026 (ECF 23).
  • The bottleneck: Bonnell’s deposition has not occurred. His deposition was stayed November 5, 2025 (ECF 167) pending resolution of his own motion for protective order (ECF 163).
  • Other unresolved motions: Plaintiff’s motion to modify scheduling order (ECF 184), Plaintiff’s Rule 56(d) motion for discovery necessary to oppose summary judgment (ECF 216), Bonnell’s summary judgment motion (ECF 210).
  • Discovery window was short: meaningful discovery didn’t begin until the Protective Order entered September 2, 2025 (ECF 116), leaving ~3.5 months.
  • ★ Foreign deposition via letter rogatory is pending. The pending letter rogatory is the one authorized by Doe v Bonnell Hague motion (ECF 145) — Göransson in Sweden. The motion references “a foreign deposition (via letter rogatory) remains pending” and separately names Melina Göransson in the deposition-discussion paragraph; these are the same witness, not two separate foreign-discovery tracks. No letter rogatory has ever been filed in this case against Solo, in the UK or anywhere else.
  • Spoliation: “issues concerning potential spoliation require further investigation and motion practice” — ties to Bonnell’s alleged deletion of messages beginning January 21, 2025. As of ECF 235 (April 17, 2026), no spoliation motion has been filed despite a year of allegations in Plaintiff’s filings.
  • Rule and standard: Fed. R. Civ. P. 16(b)(4) good-cause standard; Eleventh Circuit four-factor test (diligence, whether continuance cures, inconvenience, prejudice); Local Rule 7.6 “exceptional circumstances.”
  • Procedural: Plaintiff’s counsel conferred with defense April 2, 2026; parties did not agree. Motion verified under penalty of perjury by Joan Schlump Peters.
  • Hearing: set April 21, 2026 at 8:30 a.m., Courtroom 11-4 (ECF 228). Order (ECF 234) grants plaintiff remote telephonic appearance but counsel “will not be permitted to make any arguments” — live-argument-only hearing.

Newsletter Angles

  • The letter rogatory is not the Solo story. Earlier wiki and article drafts treated the pending letter rogatory as evidence the system was at least trying to reach Solo in the UK. The record does not support that. Plaintiff’s one Hague motion, ECF 145, targets Bonnell’s ex-wife in Sweden — a peripheral witness useful to plaintiff’s case theory, not the catfisher who caused the underlying harm. No filed mechanism in this case is attempting to reach Solo at all. This strengthens the Reachability Routing argument: the system doesn’t even try to use its available tools against the actually-culpable foreign actor, because the party who would have to invoke them (plaintiff) has no incentive to.
  • The April 21 hearing is not a trial continuance hearing in dramatic terms. It is an ordinary pretrial motion hearing that happens to be the article’s timeliness hook. The piece should treat it as an anchor, not a spectacle.
  • Bonnell has not been deposed — meaning the factual basis of the case remains largely constructed from plaintiff’s pleadings, the Nov 29 admission quoted in the complaint, the Rose deposition, and Bonnell’s public posts. The article is being written during a discovery stage, not a post-verdict one.

Entities Mentioned

Concepts Mentioned

  • Reachability Routing — updated to reflect that no filed mechanism targets Solo; the only foreign-discovery motion targets Göransson

Quotes

“This case is not trial-ready, and proceeding to trial under the current posture would be fundamentally unfair.”

“a foreign deposition (via letter rogatory) remains pending” — the witness is Göransson in Sweden (ECF 145), not Solo in the UK

Notes

  • Cited authorities are standard Eleventh Circuit continuance cases (Sosa, Romero, High Soc’y Exotics, Snook, Jones). No novel legal theory.
  • The motion is procedurally routine but rich in docket-state detail; it’s the single best single document for understanding where the case actually stands as of April 2026.
  • The order granting remote appearance (ECF 234) specifying that remote counsel “will not be permitted to make any arguments” is an unusual hands-on bench posture — suggests Judge Becerra wants live, in-person advocacy at the April 21 hearing.
  • Source of the April 18 correction: reader fact-check via r/Destiny surfaced the UK/Solo letter-rogatory error. The narrative-driven misreading (interpreting “letter rogatory” as the Solo-reachability tool) survived multiple wiki and article revisions before being corrected by cross-reading ECF 145’s full caption against this motion’s paragraph-by-paragraph references.

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