My Ex Is Suing Me For “stealing” Our Shared Google Doc Because It Made Him Lose A Freelance Client

Location: California . So my ex and I dated for 3 years. We broke up in March, mostly because he kept treating my freelance work like his backup plan. We’re both graphic designers and during the pandemic we collaborated on a bunch of shared projects , including one big brand pitch we did together through Google Drive. The deal fell through back then, and we moved on. Or so I thought. Fast forward to last month: I wake up to an email from him saying he’s taking legal action because I “stole his intellectual property.” I thought it was a joke until I got an actual letter (not from a lawyer, just him) demanding $8,000 in “damages.” Turns out he’d recycled *our old shared pitch deck* for a new client, forgot to make a copy, and when I finally cleaned up my Drive and removed my shared files, it deleted his access too. That’s it. That’s the “theft.” Apparently the client ghosted him after that because the files were suddenly gone. He now claims I intentionally sabotaged his career. The kicker? He never asked me to keep them, never paid me for that project, and they were on *my* personal Google account , not even a shared company one. I’ve since blocked him, but he keeps emailing from different addresses saying he’s “filing for civil theft of intellectual assets.” I talked to a paralegal friend who laughed but also said he *could* technically file something, which means I’d have to respond or risk default. So… what do I even do here? Is there a polite legal way to tell him to stop harassing me and that he’s full of it? Can you even “steal” a Google Doc that you literally created? I’m not scared of him, but the idea of having to pay a lawyer to fight a ridiculous lawsuit from an ex feels insane. I just want this nonsense to end.