A ZILLOW executive at the centre of a $2.63 billion ($US2 billion) lawsuit alleging the theft of trade secrets is claiming he wasn’t trying to destroy evidence when he tried to erase all the data on his home and work computers.

Instead, Curt Beardsley’s destructive urge erupted in an effort to cover up his hard-core porn habit, Zillow claims in court papers.

Zillow has much riding on that sordid defence ahead of a key hearing on Monday over whether Beardsley and his former boss at Move Inc., Errol Samuelson, destroyed evidence crucial to the legal battle between the real estate listings rivals.

Move has asked a judge to enter a judgment against Zillow before the case goes to trial on June 6. The owner of Realtor.com is seeking $2.63 billion in damages — an amount that is more than half of Zillow’s market value.

“These are precisely the circumstances under which a default sanction is warranted,” Move states in its motion declaring “spoliation,” or the intentional destruction of evidence.

Short of that, Move wants an “adverse inference” instruction. That’s when the judge tells the jury to assume that a party destroyed evidence and that it would have hurt that party’s case.

Move, which along with the National Association of Realtors filed suit in March 2014, claims Beardsley conspired with his boss to steal confidential information about the company before they both jumped to Seattle-based Zillow within 12 days of each other.

Monday’s hearing in Washington state court focuses on Move’s allegation that the defectors tried to cover their secret-stealing tracks — an exercise that, in Beardsley’s case, had him smashing a hard drive, losing three of four flash memory devices and wiping data from two computers.

Beardsley’s Move-issued laptop was one of the wiped computers, according to papers. Later, with a subpoena pending, he also deleted data from a second laptop issued by Zillow.

Zillow, led by chief executive Spencer Rascoff, contends their actions, which extended to the use of “burner” phones for calls between the company and the two execs soon to join it, were not designed to hide or eliminate evidence. They were, rather, to protect Beardsley’s “deeply religious” reputation.

“Beardsley launched the deletion or ‘clean-up’ programs to hide what he regards as a shameful history of regular visits to hard-core pornography websites,” Zillow claims in court papers.

“He struggled with his pornography usage, and did not want his new Zillow colleagues, family, or those in the industry in which he worked to know about it.”

Beardsley’s smut-removal efforts erased most of his work-related data from both laptops, including any trade secrets they may have contained. But they didn’t erase all traces of porn.

The laptop returned to Move still had evidence of visits to a couple dozen explicit sex sites, such as “naughtyirishgirl,” according to testimony from a digital forensic expert.

News Corp, which owns The Post, is also the owner of Move. It agreed to acquire the online real estate company six months after Move filed suit against Zillow.

“Zillow Group has and will continue to act with the utmost integrity in conducting our business and in vigorously defending against the claims in this litigation,” a spokeswoman said. “Ultimately this comes down to News Corp trying to win in the courts, since they aren’t winning in the court of consumer opinion. We are fully focused on innovating and continuing to grow the most popular real estate network on mobile and web.”

Move countered that the executives poached by Zillow “used all manner of subterfuge to steal some of Move’s most valuable information and ideas, then destroyed evidence of their misdeeds and concocted shifting explanations for their behaviours.”

This article originally appeared on New York Post and was reproduced with permission.