Paramount has agreed to requests from 12 states to link the federal antitrust lawsuit to existing lawsuits brought by Paramount+ subscribers.
The move means states’ challenges to the $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery will likely be referred to Judge Araceli Martinez Holguin, a Biden appointee who is already handling the earlier case.
Martinez-Holguin, whose court is in Oakland, worked for the National Immigration Law Center and the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project before being appointed to the bench in 2023.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta led a coalition of states to file the lawsuit in the Northern District of California on Monday. States are also seeking temporary restraining orders or injunctions to prevent the merger from completing. A public hearing on the motion has not yet been scheduled.
Bonta’s office filed a motion Monday linking the lawsuit to a lawsuit filed in April by Paramount+ subscribers who argued the merger would stifle competition and raise prices. The state argued that it would be more efficient to have one judge hear both cases.
“We love that judge,” Bonta said Monday on The Town’s podcast. “We like the fact that the judge is already aware of the situation and has thought about this issue and thought about the implications.”
Paramount filed a motion Tuesday to join the states’ request. A Paramount spokeswoman declined to comment.
Martinez-Holguin is scheduled to hold a hearing Thursday on the subscribers’ motion for a preliminary injunction and Paramount’s motion to dismiss the subscribers’ lawsuit.
Early Tuesday, cases in each state were randomly assigned to another Biden nominee, Judge P. Casey Pitts. Judge Pitts, while a private attorney, represented the Writers Guild of America in a dispute over agency packaging fees in 2019. The WGA has been one of the strongest supporters of litigation. Mr. Pitts, whose court is in San Jose, probably won’t litigate for long.
Mr. Pitts is already overseeing another high-profile antitrust case that has some similarities to the Paramount v. Warner Bros. case. In that case, 12 states and the District of Columbia are seeking to block the $14 billion merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks that the Trump Justice Department approved last year.
In January, Mr. Pitts acknowledged that the companies had already spent months integrating their businesses and rejected the state’s motion to halt the merger pending the outcome of the challenge. A final verdict on the case has not yet been issued.
In the WGA lawsuit, Pitts was part of the Altshuler Berzon legal team that accused WME of collecting illegal fees from studios to include clients in projects. In that case, he faced off against Jeffrey Kessler, the powerful litigator currently leading Paramount’s defense against the Warner Bros. merger.
The WGA won the war of attrition in this case, with WME and other agencies ultimately agreeing to waive package fees and exit the content production entity.
