In 2018, Google shirked off its unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil.” Maybe that was a sign. Scott Hassan, 51, who wrote much of the original code that powers the search giant, is embroiled in a nasty divorce battle that has raged for seven years. It involves millions of dollars, claims he maltreated his children, and even a shocking online revenge campaign. His ex-wife, Allison Huynh, a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s Robotics Laboratory, claims Hassan withholds a fortune from her lawyer claims she is legally entitled to. “In 2018, the [couple’s] estate was valued at $1.8 billion, and [Hassan] wanted to give her a minuscule fraction,” Huynh’s lawyer Pierce O’Donnell claimed in a statement to The New York Post.
“His court position is that she gets nothing: Zero, zip, nada. At every settlement conference, he’s reduced his offer. I haven’t seen that in my 45-year-long career. He’s trying to pull off the ultimate dirty trick on his wife and three teenage children.” Hassan told The Post that suggestions that he doesn’t want to give his ex and children any assets are “inaccurate.” A genius at robotics, Hassan is a hi-tech Dr. Dolittle who can talk to computers. Although he was never an employee of Google, Hassan’s remarkable early contributions mean he is known as the company’s unofficial third founder, along with Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Before he and Huynh wed in 2001, he obtained the right to cheaply purchase shares in the company, which would be worth billions of dollars today. But as divorce settlement proceedings are scheduled to start Monday in San Jose, California, Hassan is embroiled in a much less prestigious online endeavor. After being accused by his ex, he admitted to launching the site AllisonHuynh.com earlier this year, seeding it with links to positive articles written about his ex and to court documents from three embarrassing lawsuits involving her. “Scott was trying to bully me into dropping my [fight for assets] and accepting a pittance,” Huynh told The Post.
Asked if he put up the site, Hassan admitted to The Post: “I did, but I have taken it down. It came together in frustration when I felt Allison and her lawyer were telling one-sided stories to the press. I thought aggregating publicly available information without commenting or editorializing would help … It only made our dispute more public and tense, which was never what I intended.” Within the documents posted are sexual allegations related to Huynh’s wrongful termination suit against her former employer Samuel Ockman and Penguin Computing in 2000.
They claim that Huynh threatened to “kill [Ockman] and then herself” if he ever left her and “kept track of when Ockman was out with a new girlfriend,” according to the cross-complaint filed by Ockman and his lawyer in response to Huynh’s suit. According to a recent filing from O’Donnell, the case was “settled in Allison’s favor”. Ockman refused to comment. Huynh found out about allisonhuynh.com on August 5. “It was intended to shame and scare me by impersonating me and trying to turn the world against me,” she said. “I was distraught.” She immediately suspected her ex-husband was behind the site. O’Donnell hired forensics professionals to figure it out. Huynh said they failed, and she took matters into her own hands. “I stayed up all night and discovered a back door that Scott inadvertently did not close. I determined that the Google Drive site [which contained the lawsuit documents] was registered by Scott Wendell — Scott’s middle name. The email contact had ‘Hassan’ in it,” she told The Post. “So the genius of Silicon Valley was exposed by his wife, using her technical knowledge. Poetic justice?”
