New voicemail implies that Bosshardt paid for GPD investigation of Drotos and Ryals

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – This morning, Ward Scott Files Podcast played audio of a voicemail in which Autumn Doughton of Bosshardt Realty explained to Gainesville Police Department Detective Ronny Pinkston that if GPD would re-submit a subpoena for information (presumably in the case against Daniel Drotos and Michael Ryals, in which all charges have now been dropped), Bosshardt would pay the fee requested by the vendor.

The allegation that Bosshardt paid GPD’s expenses in an effort to support their claims that Drotos and Ryals had stolen “trade secrets” was previously made public in a federal lawsuit. That complaint states that former GPD Detective T. Tirado “admitted that Bosshardt had paid thousands of dollars to the Gainesville Police Department during the course of the investigation. Bosshardt laundered and disguised the payments by paying the Police Department’s bills, like subpoena costs, to conceal any record of the money going directly to the Police Department.”

Ward Scott played the audio on his podcast this morning and posted the transcript, in which Doughton says, “I spoke with Aaron [Bosshardt] and we’ve spoken with AppFiles… And basically um, what they say is if we just resubmit the original request, Appfiles will bill us directly and not for like that full $50,000… they will send us an invoice.”

AppFiles, a file-sharing system used by Bosshardt Realty, is important to the case because the original sworn complaint filed by Aaron Bosshardt in 2019 states that Lauren Edwards, a former employee who left to join Colliers International along with Drotos and Ryals, accessed that system and downloaded approximately 160 files without permission. The complaint states that the files contained “commercial real estate buyers, contracts, commission sheets, financial information, legal information, listings, prospect lists, and lists of sellers, all of which would provide the possessor with a business advantage.”

The voicemail implies that GPD had balked at an estimate of $50,000 from Appfiles to produce the information sought in the subpoena and that Bosshardt had found a way to pay Appfiles directly for some amount less than $50,000.

The voicemail can be heard here.

Drotos and Ryals were recently awarded over $1.3 million in commissions after a judge held that Bosshardt had breached a contract with them after they left Bosshardt. Now that the criminal charges have also been dropped, there are no remaining claims against Drotos and Ryals, and their defamation lawsuit against Aaron Bosshardt and Bosshardt Realty Services was also dismissed last week.