Defamation via Songs and AI-Generated Video? U Tenn Coach's Claim Can Go Forward
· Reason
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.
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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….
The court largely allowed plaintiff's claim to go forward, including with regard to the songs; you can read the opinion for more details, but here's an excerpt of the court's analysis:
[T]he Court recognizes and considers the context in which defendant made his allegedly defamatory statements—through song. See Kersey v. Wilson (Tenn. Ct. App. 2006) ("We must also note that a poem is a work of imagination which allows the minds of both poets and readers to venture into areas that lie beyond the realm of verifiable facts."). However, defendant's suggestion that his songs should be regarded as a "matter of opinion" is, to some extent, quelled by his promotional post to a public Facebook group titled "The Real Deal Track & Field Group." In this post, defendant claims that his songs "ain't just music" but are rather "statement[s]" that combine "lyrical warfare with real track & field knowledge." Defendant goes on to write that, through his songs, he "exposed the cracks, the deception, and the shady recruiting moves happening in the game." He also poses the question in his post, "What happens when the truth gets exposed?" …
[D]efendant's lyrics suggest that plaintiff has utilized performance-enhancing drugs to achieve his "legacy" rather through means of hard work [See Doc. 44 ("Claims you built your legacies on blood and sweat / But it[']s P.E.D. dreams")]. Again, such an accusation could hold plaintiff up to "hatred, contempt, and ridicule" [and may thus be defamatory -EV] Furthermore, the Court concludes that several of defendant's lyrics, while perhaps opinion, are nonetheless "actionable as defamatory" because they can "reasonably be understood to imply the existence of undisclosed defamatory facts justifying the opinion." Specifically, stating that plaintiff took "shortcuts" in coaching and abandoned "every rule" can lead to the conclusion that plaintiff is a cheat who flouts the rules of collegiate sports….
And the court adds this about the AI-generated videos, "which plaintiff claims attack his character with 'blatantly false allegations of wrongdoing' or are generally offensive and demeaning":
These videos include depictions of plaintiff with "Diddy" and Sherrone Moore, a disgraced former university football coach, in suggestive contexts. Unsurprisingly given the nascent nature of AI, the Court cannot find, nor do the parties identify, any case law on defamation in relation to AI content, and specifically, videos which are AI-generated. As noted previously, an alleged defamatory statement must be "judged within the context it is made" and "should be read as a person of ordinary intelligence would understand [it] in light of the surrounding circumstances."
In attempting to evaluate defamatory statements in accordance with these principles, AI content leads the Court into uncharted territory. Considering this, the Court finds it most appropriate to allow plaintiff's defamation claim as to these AI-generated videos to continue on at this stage of the litigation to allow further record development….
In July, Magistrate Judge Jill McCook declined to issue a preliminary injunction against defendant, concluding that it would be a prior restraint; that question remains pending before the District Judge. Here, the District Judge just held that the case as a whole can go forward, without deciding the preliminary injunction question.
Ryan McMillan, Gregory F. Coleman, and S. Jarret Raab (Coleman Law, PLLC) represent plaintiff.
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