During and after a hearing before a federal district judge in Philadelphia, Paige Robbins and her lawyers disagreed about who, why and when they decided to drop her claim that her laptop webcam may have captured half-naked photos of her before she graduated from Harriton High School in 2009.
Attorney Mary Elizabeth Bogan, who filed the suit for Paige Robbins last month, told U.S. District Judge John Padova she had "irreconcilable conflicts" with Robbins and her parents and wanted to withdraw from the case.
Bogan said their already strained relationship hit a breaking point when Robbins' father demanded that she litigate the suit for free, instead of for a share of any damages recovered, as she said they had previously agreed.
Bogan said she believed that Robbins and her family were stung by a crush of negative publicity and money-grabbing accusations in the wake of the suit, even though she had warned them. "I told them to put their seat belts on," Bogan said.
The Robbinses acknowledged they were bothered by the reaction to their new claim. It came a year after Blake Robbins collected his settlement, and the district paid more than $400,000 in fees to his lawyer.
After conceding that its laptops inadvertently captured tens of thousands of webcam photos of students, Lower Merion also pledged to alert students before monitoring or activating tracking software on their computers.
Paige Robbins and her parents said she was one of the students notified that her laptop camera had been activated. They said their goal was to find and destroy the photos of her, not to get a payout.
The Robbinses said they pressed Bogan to drop the suit days after she filed it on Dec. 7 - "so we wouldn't be bashed like we were the last time," Paige Robbins said - but that she instead filed a motion asking to withdraw as her attorney.
