>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.

I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.

Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called today, maybe someone wishing to convert into donations/crypto rug pull, etc. Could also be incompetence after all, but maliciousness isn't without priors.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/report-musks-500...