Jeff Abraham tried to sell his sexual wellness start-up to household goods conglomerate Reckitt Benckiser for two years. But his dream ended one night in the fall of 2016 after a Pet Shop Boys concert in Las Vegas.
In 2017, the year after Congress passed the law, the number of trade secrets lawsuits jumped 30 percent to 1,134, according to legal data analytics firm Lex Machina. The complaint also claims UK-based RB, which has a market cap of roughly $60 billion and $16 billion in annual sales, used its large presence in the marketplace to illegally push Duration sales at the expense of Promescent.
Gilbert left behind a wife, Elizabeth, and two sons. Elizabeth Gilbert was in New York City the day of the murder. She was walking down Madison Avenue that afternoon."All of a sudden — I can't explain — but all of a sudden I felt like my soul was leaving my body," she recalls."I couldn't even walk. Literally, I had to make such effort to just take a step."
Abraham was Gilbert's patient, but they became friends after ending up sitting next to each other at a Lakers game with their sons. When Abraham went in for a checkup in 2011, Gilbert told him about Promescent."I was like, 'Whoa!' I didn't realize [PE] was that big of an issue." The urologist wanted his advice on building a business around the product. Abraham asked for a sample.
"I thought, he's no longer a husband, he's no longer a friend, he's no longer a doctor, he's just some doctor shot by a crazy guy, that's his legacy," he said. De Pretre introduced Abraham to RB, and in June 2014, Abraham flew to New York to meet Volker Sydow, the head of RB's sexual wellness products division.
Abraham grew worried and started pressing RB's representatives about whether they were preparing to make a knockoff of Promescent."I was assured that they weren't innovators," he says."They bought products and blew them up." He says the company"informed him that an offer was sitting on [CEO Rakesh] Kapoor's desk and waiting for a signature."
Screen grabs show that Promescent was put behind an"adult curtain" on Amazon, while other similar products were not, including Duration.