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 in 2009 from Harriton High School.
Attorney Mary Elizabeth Bogan, who filed the suit last month for Paige Robbins, told U.S. District Judge John Padova that 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 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 accusations of money-grabbing in the wake of the suit, though she had warned them. "I told them," Bogan said, "to put their seat belts on."
The Robbinses acknowledged that they were bothered by the reaction to their new claim. It came a year after Blake Robbins had collected his settlement, and the district had 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 that they had pressed Bogan to drop the suit days after she filed it Dec. 7 - "so we wouldn't be bashed like we were the last time," Paige Robbins said - but that Bogan instead filed a motion asking to withdraw as attorney.
