An excerpt from Judge Thomas Varlan's long opinion today in Ross v. Lambert (E.D. Tenn.):
Plaintiff alleges that he is an accomplished track and field athlete who has held numerous collegiate coaching positions over the past ten years, including Head Coach and Director of Track and Field at the University of Tennessee ("UT") beginning in 2022…. [I]n May 2023, plaintiff advised defendant [an employee of the program] that he was being terminated from his position at UT. Plaintiff claims that he gave defendant the option to voluntarily resign in lieu of being fired for cause, which defendant accepted.
Defendant subsequently filed an EEOC complaint against plaintiff and UT, plaintiff asserts, but this case was closed without a finding of probable cause against either plaintiff or UT. Then, on or about May 30, 2024, defendant sent a demand letter to UT's Office of General Counsel, threatening to sue UT and plaintiff for "wrongful termination and discrimination" if he did not receive a $150,000 payment from UT.
Plaintiff alleges that, within the demand letter, defendant made a series of "patently false and inflammatory allegations" against plaintiff, which included statements claiming that plaintiff and plaintiff's son were involved in "doping." Defendant also warned in his demand letter that he would go to the media if UT did not settle. In response, UT rejected defendant's demand, citing to his "baseless" and "highly offensive" attack on plaintiff's reputation, and advised defendant that it was unwilling to engage further with defendant on the matter.
Defendant never filed a lawsuit, plaintiff submits. Instead, plaintiff claims that defendant initiated a "vindicative and wide-ranging campaign that spread untruthful and malicious information" about plaintiff and portrayed plaintiff "in a highly offensive and negative light throughout the track and field community." In more detail, plaintiff alleges that on or about March 3, 2025, defendant, using a pseudonym, released two songs on Apple Music and Spotify, both of which contain defamatory lyrics impugning plaintiff's character. Specifically, plaintiff claims that these songs contain allegations of drug use on the part of plaintiff, describes plaintiff as untrustworthy and of low character, and warns parents to not entrust their children to plaintiff. Around the same time, defendant published his songs to a public Facebook group, believed to include track and field recruits and their families…. [P]laintiff asserts that defendant [later] released … additional songs on Apple Music and Spotify….
Between December 12 and 25, 2025, defendant purportedly posted more than 20 videos on Instagram and Facebook attacking plaintiff's character with "blatantly false allegations of wrongdoing" and "highly offensive and demeaning fake [AI] videos." For example, plaintiff claims that defendant created a fake, sexually suggestive video depicting plaintiff with Sean "Diddy" Combs. Similarly, defendant allegedly posted another fake, AI-generated video depicting plaintiff in prison with Combs and Sherrone Moore, a disgraced former university football coach. In one of these videos, plaintiff asserts that defendant made it clear that he was intentionally targeting plaintiff by referring to plaintiff by name. In another video, defendant allegedly gloated that "his ongoing propaganda and online 'content' [was] negatively affecting" plaintiff's ability to attract track and field recruits to UT.
On January 2, 2026, defendant purportedly posed another AI-generated video in which he bragged about mentally torturing and abusing plaintiff for months. A few days later, defendant posted another fake interview on Instagram and Facebook in which he again accused plaintiff of infidelity and impregnating his former assistant coach….
