A Nashville jury has ordered Ryan Upchurch to pay $17.5 million to the family of Kiely Rodni, ending a trial over his online statements about the Northern California teenager’s disappearance and death.
The verdict, reached yesterday, found for Rodni’s family on all claims in the lawsuit brought by David Rodni and Daniel Robertson. The case centered on videos Upchurch posted while Rodni was missing, including one titled “ZERO proof of Kiely Rodni situation being REAL.”
Rodni was 16 when she went missing in 2022 after leaving a party near a campground in Truckee, California, near Lake Tahoe. Her vehicle was found inside a reservoir after a two-week search, and the coroner later ruled that she died by drowning and that the death was accidental. The sheriff’s office said no foul play was suspected.
The family’s lawsuit accused Upchurch of defamation, false light invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress. Upchurch asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing his comments were opinion and protected by the First Amendment, but the court rejected that request and let the case go to trial.
At the center of the dispute was a video in which Upchurch said people could become “a millionaire on GoFundMe by catfishing people with internet deaths,” pointed to a Kiely Rodni fundraising page that he said had made $63,000 in seven days, and claimed that “five GoFundMe’s for each individual person” could make someone a millionaire in two weeks. He also argued in court filings that his videos were hyperbolic and would not be understood as factual reporting, saying they contained “the same elements of drama, hyperbolic language, and heated debate” and did not present “any indication of private and personal knowledge or authority on investigations.”
The ruling lands on a case that has already been publicly examined for years, from Rodni’s disappearance to the coroner’s finding of accidental drowning. What the jury has now done is decide that Upchurch’s posts crossed the line from commentary into actionable harm, and that is the answer the family had been seeking since the lawsuit was filed.
