Former Tiltware president and Full Tilt board member Howard Lederer abruptly backed out of a planned Saturday interview with Diamond Flush regarding Full Tilt’s post-Black Friday collapse and failure to repay roughly $300 million in player balances owed to its worldwide customers.
The pseudonymous Diamond Flush and her like-named website (diamondflushpoker.com), is an offshoot of the former Subject:Poker website, and like the earlier S:P has been a leading outlet for hard documentation regarding Full Tilt’s internal corporate activities.
The Diamond Flush website also recently featured an interview with Team Full Tilt member and shareholder Andy Bloch, while Lederer appeared twice in the last two weeks in lengthy video interviews with PokerNews and the 2+2 poker podcast.
In announcing Lederer’s backout, “Diamond Flush” wrote that the interview was “much harder on [he] and his family than he expected”, although the prospect of a more confrontational interview almost certainly played a role in Lederer’s reneging.
As Diamond Flush wrote:
My interview was promised even before the filming began for the Lederer Files. The timing was changed a few times and finally reconfirmed earlier this past week to happen this weekend, in fact, yesterday. I’ve spent many hours speaking to Howard these last weeks, and although he had some idea of my concern that the real story come out, he was never given any questions by me. I have little doubt, and he knows that I know, that he dodged plenty of bullets.
The story about Lederer’s withdrawal also suggested plans to publish more hard information about Full Tilt affairs on the Diamond Flush site, possibly beginning today. The information, according to Diamond Flush, will be her “own take” on what Lederer both said publicly and omitted in his previous interviews.
Diamond Flush strongly suggests Lederer has lied in some on his previous statements, writing, “Readers will see some of the questions that I would have asked, what I believe Howard would have answered (based on his already on the record answers) and what the truth really is.”
Separately, discussion of the Lederer backout on major poker discussion forums has included a call by many posters for Diamond Flush herself to acknowledge her real identity, befitting her assumed role as an investigative journalist. To date, she has not indicated plans to make that identity public.
