The winner of Maine’s record $1.35 billion Mega Millions jackpot is trying to end a lawsuit he brought against his former partner after an appeals court left him facing the very outcome he said he wanted to avoid: public disclosure of his identity. The man, identified in the case as “John Doe,” sued the mother of his child in November 2023, alleging that she breached a non-disclosure agreement by telling his father and stepmother about the jackpot.
A jackpot dispute turns into a privacy dilemma
The dispute has now reached an unusual point. Doe asked the court to let him dismiss the case after the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling refusing to conduct the trial in private. His position is straightforward but uncomfortable. If the litigation continues in open court, the process of trying to enforce the NDA could reveal the personal information the agreement was supposed to protect. In other words, winning the lawsuit could still mean losing the privacy battle.
The motion to dismiss does not necessarily end the case immediately. The former partner, identified as “Sara Smith,” plans to oppose dismissal without prejudice because that form of dismissal could allow Doe to bring another case later. Her lawyer has argued that if the lawsuit is going away, it should end in a way that prevents the same dispute from being restarted.
What the original lawsuit alleged
Doe’s lawsuit focused on a confidentiality agreement he said was designed to protect the safety of himself, Smith and their daughter after the enormous jackpot became public knowledge. According to the claim, Smith was not supposed to disclose information that could identify the winner or reveal details about where the family lived. Doe alleged that she broke that agreement by speaking to his father and stepmother.
The requested remedies were substantial. Doe asked for an injunction preventing further disclosures, an order requiring Smith to identify everyone she had told, and compensatory damages of at least $100,000 for each unauthorized disclosure. The size of the requested damages shows that the case was not simply about whether a promise had been broken. Doe’s legal position treated each alleged disclosure as a separate event with potentially serious consequences.
The NDA itself was framed around security and privacy. The lawsuit said it was intended to reduce the risk of “irreparable harm” if the media or general public learned the family’s identities and home address. That concern is understandable in the context described by the filing: a $1.35 billion jackpot instantly turns an otherwise private person into someone whose finances and personal relationships may attract public attention.
Smith denied violating the agreement. Her lawyers also argued that the lawsuit was being used as pressure in a separate child-custody conflict. In one filing, Smith said Doe had hired a private security team that followed her and their daughter every day. Those allegations widened the dispute beyond the narrow question of whether someone had repeated confidential information.
Why anonymity became the central issue
The decisive complication came from the courts’ approach to open proceedings. In April 2025, a judge refused Doe’s request for a closed trial. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later upheld that decision, agreeing that closing the courtroom would conflict with the traditional principle that court proceedings are generally open to the public.
That ruling created the Catch-22 described by Doe’s attorneys. He filed the lawsuit because he wanted to prevent disclosure of his identity and other confidential information. Yet litigating that same lawsuit could require the facts of the dispute to be aired publicly. His lawyers acknowledged the contradiction directly in the dismissal motion, arguing that even a successful result could expose the information the lawsuit was meant to protect.
This is the point where the case became less about the alleged conversation with family members and more about the mechanics of enforcing privacy through the courts. A confidentiality agreement can create obligations between private parties, but once a dispute over that agreement reaches open court, the process itself may generate records, testimony and hearings. In Doe’s situation, that procedural reality undermined the practical value of continuing.
The appeals court did not rule that privacy concerns were unimportant. Instead, it upheld the lower court’s decision that the requested level of secrecy was inconsistent with the historic role of public courts. That distinction matters because it explains why Doe’s legal claim and his privacy objective pulled in opposite directions.
Why Smith opposes dismissal without prejudice
Doe’s request is to dismiss the lawsuit without prejudice. That phrase is important because it generally leaves open the possibility of bringing the claim again. Smith’s attorney, Peter Brann, said he intends to oppose that outcome. His concern is that Doe could withdraw now and later file another lawsuit based on the same underlying conflict.
Brann told the Portland Press Herald that he did not want Smith left exposed to another case. He described the current lawsuit as baseless and argued that it should not have been filed in the first place. From Smith’s perspective, therefore, a simple withdrawal does not necessarily resolve the broader legal uncertainty. A dismissal that permanently ends the claim would provide a much clearer conclusion.
The procedural argument does not settle the truth of the original NDA allegations. It instead concerns what legal options remain after dismissal. That is why the dispute can continue even though the plaintiff himself is asking to stop. The defendant still has an interest in the terms under which the case ends.
For readers following the story, this is an important distinction. The headline fact is that the jackpot winner wants to drop the lawsuit. The unresolved issue is whether the court will allow him to do so on terms that preserve his ability to sue again. Smith’s opposition means the final procedural outcome may still require another decision.
The broader lesson from the dispute
The case shows how quickly a private disagreement can become more complicated after a very large lottery win. The original issue was narrow: whether confidential information had been disclosed in breach of an NDA. But the litigation added questions about open courts, anonymity, personal security, family conflict and the long-term consequences of public filings.
The size of the jackpot magnified every part of the dispute. A $1.35 billion prize creates unusual attention, and the lawsuit itself risked generating the publicity Doe said he feared. That is the irony at the centre of the case: the mechanism chosen to enforce secrecy threatened to make secrecy impossible.
The current motion does not rewrite what happened before. Doe still alleges that Smith violated the NDA, while Smith continues to deny wrongdoing and has challenged the motives behind the case. The appeals court ruling likewise did not decide the underlying breach claim. It dealt with whether the trial could be closed to protect Doe’s identity.
At this stage, the most significant development is that the privacy calculation appears to have overtaken the damages claim. Continuing the case might offer a chance to pursue the remedies Doe originally sought, but it would also require him to accept the possibility of public identification. His request to dismiss indicates that avoiding that disclosure has become the more important objective.
The final procedural result will depend on how the court handles Smith’s opposition. What is already clear is that the dispute has become a cautionary example of how confidentiality agreements, enormous lottery prizes and open-court rules can collide in ways that neither side may have anticipated when the agreement was signed.
What remains unresolved as the case winds down
The current filing still leaves one procedural question open: on what terms the lawsuit will end. Doe wants to withdraw without prejudice, while Smith wants protection from the possibility of being sued again over the same dispute. That disagreement is narrower than the original NDA claim, but it determines whether the litigation truly closes.
Nothing in the source says the court has already ruled on that objection. The safest reading is therefore that Doe has changed course after losing the fight for a private trial, while Smith is contesting the form of the withdrawal. The underlying accusations remain disputed, and the appeals decision dealt with courtroom openness rather than deciding whether the NDA was actually breached.
That makes the final stage less dramatic than the original damages demand but still important. The case began as an attempt to enforce confidentiality. It may end with the parties arguing over whether the plaintiff can walk away while keeping the option of another lawsuit alive.
Why the requested damages mattered
The demand for at least $100,000 per unauthorized disclosure gave the original lawsuit a financial dimension that was easy to overlook once anonymity became the dominant issue. Doe was not only asking the court to stop future disclosures. He also wanted the defendant to identify everyone she had allegedly told and to compensate him separately for each disclosure that violated the agreement.
That structure would have required the litigation to examine who received the information, when they received it and whether each communication fell within the NDA. The more detailed that inquiry became, the more personal information could have entered the record. This helps explain why the open-trial ruling changed the practical value of the case. A damages claim built around individual disclosures naturally invites evidence about the very communications Doe wanted kept private.
The case therefore moved from a simple enforcement question into a conflict between remedies and confidentiality. The stronger the effort to prove multiple breaches, the greater the possibility that testimony and documents would reveal details about the winner, his family and the circumstances surrounding the jackpot. That tension did not erase the claim, but it made pursuing it much less attractive after the courts refused a closed proceeding.