The strange legal saga that torpedoed Jeff Shell’s career at Paramount Skydance has ended with a whimper.

An attorney for Las Vegas gambler and self-styled “fixer” Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani has asked a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge to dismiss the scorched-earth lawsuit he brought against Shell in March. Cipriani had been demanding $150 million for allegedly providing “sophisticated, high-value crisis communications services, entirely without compensation” to Shell over 18 months.

Shell’s attorneys separately filed court documents to withdraw a counter-lawsuit against Cipriani.

The bitter feud captivated Hollywood earlier this year after Cipriani went public with his grievances against Shell, whom he met nearly two years ago through powerlawyer Patricia Glaser.

Glaser had arranged a meeting in August 2024 between Cipriani and Shell, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal. At the time, she and Shell suspected Cipriani was behind an online whisper campaign to spread rumors about Shell just as he was trying to mount a comeback at Paramount.

A year earlier, Shell had lost his job as NBCUniversal’s chief executive over an inappropriate relationship with an underling.

Cipriani claimed Shell turned to him for protection against potential bad publicity. In his lawsuit, Cipriani alleged that during months of on-again, off-again conversations, Shell dished sensitive information to him, including that Paramount was poised to strike a $7.7-billion deal to bring UFC fights to Paramount+.

Cipriani also alleged Shell had reneged on a promise to help him develop a show at Paramount as compensation for his occasional work.

Shell has long maintained that he never made such a promise. He contends Cipriani, a self-professed whistleblower who goes by the handle RobinHood702 (the Las Vegas area code), was trying to shake him down.

“I didn’t pay this guy a cent,” Shell said Thursday. “From the very beginning, I wasn’t going to pay him a cent.”

Earlier this spring, Paramount conducted an external review into Shell’s conduct and found no violation of securities laws.

The nasty spat culminated in April when Shell agreed to resign as president of Paramount Skydance to concentrate on his legal headache.

At the time, Cipriani had widened his lawsuit to include Shell’s wife, Laura, and tech billionaire Larry Ellison, whose son David Ellison runs Paramount. Cipriani named others, including the Ellisons’ investment partner, RedBird Capital Partners. Cipriani’s lawyer subpoenaed entertainment and sports executive Ari Emanuel to get testimony to advance the beef.

Shell and Paramount’s lawyers fought back, demanding sanctions be leveled against Cipriani for an alleged overreach.

On Tuesday, Cipriani’s attorney Steven J. Aaronoff filed a request for “a dismissal of the entire action, with prejudice, as to all parties and all causes of action … against all named Defendants, including Jeff Shell, Laura Shell, Paramount Skydance Corp., RedBird Capital Partners LLC, David Ellison and Lawrence J. Ellison.”

Cipriani and Aaronoff were not immediately available for comment.

On Thursday, Glaser declined to comment. The veteran litigator found herself in hot water after her efforts to broker a detente between Cipriani and Shell spectacularly backfired.

Staff writer Stacy Perman contributed to this report.

One of the rules I came to live by during my years of covering global trouble spots is: “Never assume that things can’t get worse.”

But it will be hard to find a worse display of shameful servility to the Trump administration by a scientific organization than the American Diabetes Association provided on Friday.

During the organization’s annual conference in New Orleans, five of its leading members — four former presidents and the current editor of Diabetes Care, its official journal — were distributing paper copies of an editorial from the journal decrying the administration’s aggressive attack on scientific research and funding.

Suddenly they were confronted by security guards and New Orleans police and manhandled out of the hall. (A video is here, courtesy of MedPageToday.)

Their papers were confiscated. They were ordered to surrender their passes and were informed that if they tried to reenter the hall they would be arrested for trespassing.

“We printed 1,000 copies of the editorial, at my personal expense, and we hoped that 200 people who hadn’t seen it would read it,” Steven Kahn, director of the Diabetes Research Center at the University of Washington, editor of the journal and the lead author of the editorial, told me.

Instead, the editorial has become a must-read, with tens of thousands of page views and widespread condemnation of the conference organizers’ actions.

An open letter to the ADA started by David Nathan of Massachusetts General Hospital, titled “Shame on You” and stating that “the seeming endorsement by the ADA of the current administration’s approach to science and of its attacks on freedom of speech is unconscionable” has more than 6,400 signatories on change.org as of this writing.

The Diabetes Association implied in an official statement that the scientists had breached IRS regulations that include “maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events.” On Wednesday, the organization said it would commission “a thorough independent review of the events that occurred.”

The organization’s action underscores one reason why the Trump administration’s wholesale attack on scientific research has reached a level that, as I’ve written, will have generational ramifications: It’s because some of our most august scientific organizations have failed to stand up for principle.

“It’s part of a larger systems failure among the academic medical centers, research universities, scientific and professional societies and the National Academies,” says Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine, a vaccine expert and veteran adversary of pseudoscience.

The attention given to individual incidents such as the ADA conflict obscure what Hotez calls “the greater reality … a much darker MAHA strategy to tear down American biomedicine.” The goal, he says, is to supplant independent academic research with “an entire system of pseudoscience and grift.” MAHA is the administration’s acronym for “Make America Healthy Again.”

The latest iteration of this effort came late last month with a rule proposal from the Office of Management and Budget, which is headed by the arch-conservative Russell Vought, that would in effect make all scientific grant applications subject to the oversight of politically-appointed commissars.

Among other provisions, grants would be rejected if they’re judged to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate … diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “gender ideology” such as “theories or ideologies that deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans.”

The OMB proposal finally stirred major scientific bodies to speak up. “This latest move is a brazen power grab,” the American Association for the Advancement of Science said through its chief executive, Sudip Parikh. “If this rule becomes final, Americans’ hopes for future cures, national security and economic strength will rely on the scientific sensibilities of the nation’s chief bureaucrat.”

As it happens, the OMB proposal dropped just as the economic consequences of the extremist war on science were becoming clearer than ever.

Among the thousands of grants and programs that perished when the administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, was a program monitoring the advance of the New World screwworm north from Central America.

The screwworm, which has the capacity to devastate cattle and sheep herds, has now appeared in Texas, where its costs could be enormous. Just last year, the Dept. of Agriculture calculated that the eradication of the pest in the U.S. in the 1990s yielded annual economic benefits to producers of an inflation-adjusted $1.7 billion a year to the cattle industry and $6 billion a year to the broader economy. A new outbreak, the USDA estimated, could cost the Texas economy $1.8 billion.

Then there’s measles. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 2,030 U.S. cases this year as of June 4, almost as many as were seen in all of 2025 (when there were 2,288, including three deaths), the worst outbreak since 1991. This is the harvest of the anti-vaccine ideology being spread by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The outbreak’s consequences can be measured in dollars and cents: Responding to an outbreak of as few as 600 cases could cost local agencies $10 million, according to healthcare researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

The Trump administration has proposed slashing the budget of the grant making National Science Foundation by 61% and of the National Institutes of Health by 40%. The budget of the CDC, which once reigned as a global gold-standard for public health oversight but has suffered from the disdain of RFK Jr. and his minions, would be cut by 44%.

Taken together, these cuts “would shrink the economy by $1 trillion compared with maintaining the 2025 level of R&D,” reckons the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a science and tech think tank.

What frightens scientists more than the sheer numbers are that the cuts are arbitrary and manifestly pernicious. A study published last year in JAMA Internal Medicine identified 383 NIH-funded clinical trials that the administration terminated, leaving more than 74,000 participants high and dry.

“Scientific investment is not a cost to be minimized,” Henry Miller, a former biotech official at the Food and Drug Administration, observed recently; “it is an engine of national wealth. … The internet, mRNA vaccines, human gene therapy, GPS, the transistor — all emerged from the sustained public investment being dismantled today.”

The Diabetes Care editorial that Kahn and his colleagues attempted to distribute at the New Orleans conference is a cri de coeur targeted at the right-wing anti-science campaign. It’s titled, “Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States.”

The result of the funding reductions, the authors wrote, will be “researchers being forced out of science and fewer people considering biomedical investigation as a career. Are we ready to watch the crippling of scientific advances in diabetes and all other diseases? It is no longer enough to stand idly by or work behind the scenes with lawmakers. Moreover, it is no longer appropriate to fret about political backlash.”

The scientists intended their distribution of the article implicitly as a counterweight to a keynote talk by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who was going to speak without taking questions but who bailed out at the last minute. I sought a comment from Bhattacharya, who portrays himself as a champion of open scientific debate, about the eviction of the five scientists from the conference, but got no reply.

The uproar has roiled the ADA. Its president-elect, endocrinologist Jennifer Green of Duke University, and its scientific sessions planning committee chair, diabetes expert Mark Atkinson of the University of Florida, have both resigned their positions, though their role in the evictions, if any, is unknown.

The so-called New Orleans Five demanded an apology from the association, Kahn told me. They got one Wednesday from ADA Chief Executive Charles Henderson, via a video in which he extended his apology to “the broader diabetes community,” many members of which of whom he acknowledged were “disturbed, disappointed and concerned about what occurred.”

The truth is that the ADA’s action only validated the editorial’s exhortation to scientists to speak out forcefully: “We can no longer afford complacency and fear. We must all act now!” Will other scientific bodies draw a lesson from what happened in New Orleans? Let’s hope so.