CONFIRMED
This is the plain-language edition of the two-witness-statements update. Same facts, same grade, none of the case or filing numbers, and nothing collapsed into boxes. Every claim below is stated again on the cited edition with the documents attached.
In its own video series about this dispute, Bricks & Minifigs put its evidence against the journalist on the screen in two words: “two witness testimonies.” Both of those statements have now been read in public, so anyone can check what the company’s case actually rests on. Here is what they say. One is a man who overheard a stranger airing grievances in a smoke shop. The other is a man who opened an office door, was asked a question about getting a LEGO collection back, and watched the visitors leave when asked. The word “extortion” appears in neither one. It gets added later, by lawyers in a lawsuit and by a detective in a sworn warrant, and that detective’s own body camera, in this same case, says there “really was no extortion code that would fit.” The extortion charge was never filed. This is the entire evidentiary base of the case that opened a reporter’s Google account, and it is empty.
This framing is not the site’s; it is the company’s. In the third episode of its own series, a screen compares the two sides and reduces its case to one line: “Ammon’s Evidence: Two witness testimonies,” set against “Ben’s Evidence: All the raw footage of our interaction.” The case folder shown in the same footage confirms the count: two statement files and one door-camera video. So the whole universe of testimony behind an attempted-extortion theory is exactly two documents, and both are now public.
The first statement comes from Adam Brimhall, by several accounts the son of the company’s chief financial officer. He writes that one morning in December he happened to overhear a customer in an Orem smoke shop talking about the campaign against the company. The customer, in his telling, described things already done, like a parody of the store’s window sign, and said a store had “stole LEGOS from a dying old man” and that they were “taking matters into their own hands to make it right.”
Now read that as evidence. There is no demand in it, no threat, and no money at all. The conduct described is protest signs, which is speech. And the grievance itself, making right what was stolen from a dying old man, is the opposite of extortion: it is a claim that something owed is being recovered, and it was put into the case file by the company’s own witness. The statement is unsigned and unsworn, and it ends by admitting that almost all of it is paraphrase, “not verbatim.” It is a memo, with no oath behind it.
One more thing. The customer he overheard has come forward publicly: Sheldon Norcross. By his account, the man who wrote the statement approached him pretending to be a fan, the encounter “completely sketched me out,” and the one dramatic detail in the statement, a plan to “go after a food truck cult,” was something he invented on the spot to end the conversation. In his words: “he lied and I lied.” So the single insider-sounding detail in the company’s first witness statement is, by the speaker’s own account, a fiction made up to shake off a stranger who was hiding why he was asking.
The second statement comes from an employee inside the company’s Provo office, and it describes the visit the whole extortion theory rests on. Two young men were at the door. The employee opened it and let them into the lobby. They asked, in his words, “how they should go about getting their lego collection back” from a store that, they said, had been loaned the collection to sell and was not giving it back. A staff member told them the stores are independently owned, said this was not the place for the complaint, and asked them to leave. They asked more questions, were asked again, and, in the statement’s own words, “relented and left.”
That is the office extortion. They were let in, they asked how to get a collection back, and they left when asked. And then the number. The company’s lawsuit, filed under oath, says the journalist “demanded $200,000” and warned that things would get “very bad” if it was not paid. Here is where the $200,000 actually comes from, in the company’s own witness’s words: “I asked how much the collection was worth and they said $200,000.” It was not a demand. It was the answer to the witness’s own question about what the collection was worth. That statement is also unsigned and unsworn, emailed to the detective three weeks after the visit.
Line the four documents up in time and you can watch the crime get written in. First, the two witnesses, in December, in their own words: confrontational questions, a window-sign parody, no demand, no threat, no money as a weapon. Second, the company’s own incident log, months later, relabels it “harassment and vandalization.” Third, the company’s lawsuit turns the answered question into “demanded $200,000” and calls it extortion, the first time that word appears anywhere. Fourth, the detective’s sworn warrant makes “attempted theft by extortion” the lead charge. Nothing new was discovered between the first version and the last. The same December evening was simply described in scarier words each time it was rewritten by someone further from the room.
Even the warrant gives it away: it describes the visitors as demanding what “they believed” they were owed, connected to a lawsuit. Demanding what you believe you are owed is the textbook opposite of extortion, and it is written into the very affidavit that swears extortion happened.
Two public facts close this out. On body camera, working this case, the detective told the company there “really was no extortion code that would fit.” Two months later she swore under oath that there was probable cause for attempted theft by extortion, and that sworn theory is what opened the journalist’s Google account. And then: the extortion charge was never filed. What was filed is two misdemeanors, disorderly conduct and trespass. The crime that justified the search does not exist in the case that followed it.
Three absences, all from the company’s own paperwork. The staff member who actually did the talking in the office, delivered the “independently owned” script and asked the visitors to leave, never gave a statement at all. Nobody gave a statement describing the second office visit, the one on the day the charged conduct supposedly happened. And the company’s own thirteen-page incident log does not treat the office visit as an incident; by the log’s own words, the smoke-shop story was only handed to the investigating officer after the men showed up at headquarters. The log even misdates the encounter and gets the day of the week wrong.
The fair counterpoint. Witnesses are not supposed to use legal words; deciding what counts as a crime is a job for lawyers and prosecutors, so the absence of the word “extortion” in a witness account does not by itself prove there was none. Both witnesses may have described their encounters honestly and still missed something that happened elsewhere, on the phone, in messages, or during the second visit no statement covers, and the door-camera video has not been published here. The detective’s recorded remark that no code “fit” was an offhand comment, not a ruling. The family tie between the first witness and the company’s finance chief is reported at the strength it has been established, well-supported but not certain. Everyone named is presumed innocent, the witnesses included; nothing here accuses either witness of lying, and the more natural reading is the opposite: they described real, ordinary encounters, and the distance between those encounters and “attempted theft by extortion” was created above them. This page only asserts what the four documents say when placed side by side.
Every document named here is linked from the cited edition of this update: both witness statements as read publicly, the company’s lawsuit and its incident log, the sworn warrant, and the detective’s body-camera line from the company’s own episode. The warrant story itself is here, the phone-line voice from the same department is here, and the wider pattern is The takedown.
Primary sources, all public and all linked from the cited edition: the two witness statements the company submitted, its own verified lawsuit and incident log, the sworn search warrant, the company’s own Episode 3, and the smoke-shop customer’s public account in his own words.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam