A South Carolina judge has found Mandy Matney in civil contempt and ordered her to pay $176,500 after she did not appear for a subpoenaed deposition tied to litigation over the 2019 boat crash that killed Mallory Beach. Circuit Judge R. Keith Kelly said Matney deliberately disregarded a valid subpoena and a prior court order requiring her to show up.
The ruling, filed Monday in a 22-page order, adds $171,500 in attorneys' fees and costs to a $5,000 fine. Matney was subpoenaed as a non-party witness in civil litigation arising from the crash, a case that also helped expose Alex Murdaugh's finances as investigators uncovered his financial crimes.
The contempt order lands because the deposition did not happen in a vacuum. Beach was 19 when she died in February 2019 in Beaufort County, after a crash that later led to boating under the influence charges against Paul Murdaugh. Those charges were dismissed after Paul Murdaugh and Maggie Murdaugh were fatally shot at the family's Colleton County hunting estate in June 2021.
Kelly wrote that Matney refused to appear at the Bluffton deposition site on March 27 even though she acknowledged the court had denied her effort to quash the subpoena and had ordered the deposition to go forward. The order says she appeared by Zoom from another law office in Bluffton instead of at the noticed location.
That left the judge with a simple conclusion: Matney's safety concerns did not excuse missing the deposition when the court had already ruled on the subpoena. Kelly found clear and convincing evidence that her failure to appear was not the result of confusion, mistake or inability, which is the standard that separates a punishable refusal from an honest problem with compliance.
The case now moves from the deposition fight to the cost of losing it. The court has already decided the issue that mattered most on Monday: Matney was not free to choose a remote appearance after being ordered to attend in person, and the financial penalty she now faces is the price of that choice.
