From the Complaint in Robertson v. Upchurch (M.D. Tenn.), just filed today (paragraph numbers and some paragraph breaks deleted); recall, of course that these are all just the plaintiffs' allegations:
Ryan Upchurch is a media personality, musician, and prolific "YouTuber" who has approximately 3,110,000 subscribers on YouTube as of the date of this filing.
Upchurch began posting about the disappearance of Kiely Rodni, the granddaughter of Plaintiff David Robertson and the daughter of Plaintiff Daniel Rodni, after Kiely's disappearance in August 2022 became a viral international news story…. Upchurch had not previously participated in so-called "true crime" YouTube but began to do so as the Kiely Rodni case became "news."
Kiely Rodni disappeared after a party near Tahoe National Forest on August 6, 2022. In the weeks following her disappearance, numerous online posters began wildly speculating as to "what really happened" to Kiely Rodni. (As it would ultimately turn out, Kiely died of drowning when her vehicle crashed into the Prosser Reservoir and became submerged below fourteen feet of water. No foul play was suspected.)
Ryan Upchurch was a prominent figure in this wild speculation. After Kiely's Rodni body had been found, and after authorities had publicly stated that an autopsy had confirmed her identity, Upchurch uploaded several videos making outlandish claims, including that Kiely Rodni, Daniel Rodni, and David Robertson were "not real" and that the entire tragic episode was a "scam" by Kiely's family to raise money on a GoFundMe website. Upchurch also published images of David Robertson and further published Daniel Rodni's former home address to his 3 million subscribers.
