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The guilty plea
On September 15, 2017, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced that Michael Arnstein, 41, had pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to forge a federal judge’s signature in connection with a scheme to get websites containing negative reviews of his business removed from Google search results.
Michael Arnstein’s company
Arnstein began working at his family’s jewelry company in the mid-1990s and eventually succeeded his father as president. Founded in 1939, the company specializes in selling white sapphires as an alternative to diamonds for engagement rings. The company has an e-commerce website as well as a showroom and workshop in midtown Manhattan. It also has mining and production facilities in Sri Lanka.
Athlete and Fruitarian
According to his personal website, Arnstein has been a competitive runner since high school. He has run in over 100 marathons, and around 50 ultra marathons. Arnstein’s personal record marathon time is under 2 hours 30 minutes. In 2012, he ran in a 153 mile ultra marathon called Spartathalon and finished 25th overall in 33 hours 21 minutes. Arnstein is 5’4” tall and weighs 120 lbs.
Arnstein became interested in the potential health benefits of a fruit-based diet after his father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer at a relatively early age. In 2008, he began eating a diet consisting entirely of raw fruits and vegetables, and he credits his diet for significantly improving his athletic performance. In 2011, when Arnstein lived in New York and was running 100-200 miles a week, he and his family would consume around 500 pounds of fruits every 10 days. He is married with three children. Arnstein would purchase the fruit in bulk from a wholesaler in Brooklyn.
Arnstein calls himself “The Fruitarian” and maintains both a website and a YouTube channel under that name. His YouTube channel has over 27,000 subscribers and almost 3.3 million views, and he has posted 102 videos since 2010. Arnstein is the founder of The Woodstock Fruit Festival which is billed as “a celebration of health, fruit-based diet and personal growth.” He has been featured in numerous magazines and other media including a CNN interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta in September 2013. Arnstein lived in the New York City area for most of his life until moving to Kailua, Hawaii around 2013.
The forgery scheme
According to the criminal complaint filed in March 2017, the forgery scheme can be traced back to October 2012 when Arnstein obtained a genuine judicial order that he later used to create counterfeit orders. The genuine judicial order came from a defamation lawsuit that Arnstein’s company filed against two parties in October 2011. The first defendant eventually entered into a settlement with Arnstein’s company, but the second defendant failed to appear in court, and the presiding judge (Judge Alison Nathan) entered an order for default judgement against it. Among other things, the default judgement ordered the second defendant to take down 54 URLs that allegedly contained defamatory information about Arnstein’s company.
Around a year and a half later, in February 2014, Arnstein instructed one of his employees to digitally alter the genuine judicial order, apparently using Photoshop, by changing the date of the order and adding new URLs containing unfavorable reviews of his business. The employee made the changes and sent the document back to Arnstein as a PDF file.
According to the complaint, “Google has a policy of “de-indexing,” or removing from its search results, websites that have been identified as defamatory by court order.”
On October 22, 2014, Arnstein sent the counterfeit court order to Google as part of a request for Google to de-index six URLs containing purportedly defamatory information about his company.
On November 19, 2014, Google responded to Arnstein’s email confirming the removal of the six URLs from their search results.
Over the next two years, Arnstein sent at least ten other emails to Google requesting it to de-index URLs relating to his company. All of the emails had similar counterfeit court orders attached, except that each order had different dates and lists of purportedly defamatory URLs.
The potential sentence
The federal crime of conspiracy to forge a judicial signature carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Arnstein is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Andrew Carter on April 20June 1September 7October 19, 2018.
Update: Arnstein was sentenced on October 19.