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Russian Man Drops Lawsuit Claiming iPhone Turned Him Gay

By Michael Bamidele

17 October 2019   |   3:44 pm

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D.E. Razumilov, the Russian man who sued American tech giant Apple after claiming an iPhone app turned him gay has withdrawn his complaint. According to his lawyer, Sapizhat Gusnieva the lawsuit was withdrawn due to privacy fears. "Today we abandoned the legal demands," his attorney said Thursday, after the first hearing behind closed doors in a Moscow…

Russian Man Drops Lawsuit Claiming iPhone Turned Him Gay

D.E. Razumilov, the Russian man who sued American tech giant Apple after claiming an iPhone app turned him gay has withdrawn his complaint.

According to his lawyer, Sapizhat Gusnieva the lawsuit was withdrawn due to privacy fears.

“Today we abandoned the legal demands,” his attorney said Thursday, after the first hearing behind closed doors in a Moscow court.

Gusnieva said Razumilov faced pressure online after “haters found his information” and “Apple supporters began to write to him”. Razumilov “no longer wants to continue with the case,” she told reporters at the court.

He decided not to go forward because he would have needed to attend forthcoming hearings.

In the original complaint, Razumilov claimed to have been turned gay after he ordered Bitcoins through an iPhone app but received a different currency called “GayCoin” with the note: “Don’t judge until you try.”

He subsequently broke up with his girlfriend and experimented with a series of same-sex relationships, until he found a stable partner which left him ashamed.

“I can say after the passage of two months that I’m mired in intimacy with a member of my own sex and can’t get out,” his complaint continues. “I have a steady boyfriend and I don’t know how to explain it to my parents. After receiving the aforementioned message, my life has changed for the worse and will never be normal again.”

Razumilov had been initially seeking $15,560 (N5,422,500) in damages from Apple. An Apple representative at Thursday’s hearing did not make any comments to the media.

Homophobia is widespread in Russia where reports of rights violations and attacks on LGBT people are common, though there are gay scenes in major cities.

Moscow in 2013 introduced a law against “gay propaganda”, which officially bans the “promotion of non-traditional lifestyles to minors” but in effect outlaws LGBT activism.