The contention from his lawyers was that no other libel case again a media company resulted in them having to turn over as much data as Alex had to. That he tur

The contention from his lawyers was that no other libel case again a media company resulted in them having to turn over as much data as Alex had to. That he turned over multiple gigabytes of data. So to say he "ignored discovery" is probably not what happened here. Just the fact that he sat through 10 days of depositions, imagine getting interrogated for 10 days. Has to be close to torturous. Turning over all your email/phone data, your financial records, email and phone data from all your employees, and still being asked for more and more. I doubt the NY times, or CNN would ever be forced to turn over all their employee emails in a libel case. Eventually he wasn't going to able to turn over something. For example he may have not had google analytics to his youtube channel that youtube took down. You yourself might assume that Alex was going to get a fair trial if he cooperated more with discover. But is that even a reasonable assumption. His own lawyers may have know that this was a political case he was going to lose no matter what, if the discovery process was already unusually intrusive.