The Silicon Valley congressional race is getting ugly

The primary isn’t until early June, but the CA-17 race between five-term incumbent Ro Khanna and tech founder Ethan Agarwal is already getting nasty. Agarwal entered the race in March, backed by a roster of prominent tech billionaires largely in response to Khanna’s public support for a proposed California ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on residents worth more than $1 billion.

Agarwal, for his part, has been going after Khanna by primarily citing his stock trades while in office.

Now newsrooms covering the race have been receiving anonymous packages of digital court documents detailing Agarwal’s legal past. The file includes a $683,000 personal judgment against him after he stopped making payments on a $2 million copyright settlement with Universal Music Group, which had accused his company Aaptiv — a workout app that paired audio coaching with licensed music — of using its recordings without permission; a nearly $2 million landlord lawsuit tied to Aaptiv’s One World Trade Center office, filed in 2023 over a lease Aaptiv walked away from during COVID; and a 2019 federal lawsuit alleging adult content was downloaded from Agarwal’s IP address. The last was brought by Malibu Media (a company that filed thousands of nearly identical suits against IP addresses across the country and was widely criticized as a legal shakedown operation).

The landlord case was later dropped; the Malibu Media case settled without any court finding of liability. The UMG judgment is the most substantive item in the file. Agarwal personally guaranteed the $2 million settlement before stopping payments three months from the finish line; the two sides later brokered another settlement.

Agarwal got ahead of at least one story himself. After the New York Post on Friday ran the headline “Silicon Valley tech candidate was sued for downloading lots of porn,” Agarwal shared it on social media, writing: “I think transparency and authenticity is important among political candidates. We’re people. We’re not perfect. Yes, this is embarrassing. But now you know my worst thing.”

Investor Chamath Palihapitiya, one of his prominent backers, weighed in soon after, tweeting to Agarwal: “The opposition research has started on you because you may win and Ro is starting to get worried.”