Jury awards Kiely Rodni family $17.5 million over false conspiracy video

A federal jury in Nashville handed Kiely Rodni’s family a $17.5 million verdict after finding Ryan Upchurch liable for spreading false conspiracy claims about the missing California teenager. The ruling turned a viral true-crime pile-on into a courtroom rebuke, with jurors siding with Rodni’s family on claims including defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Rodni vanished after a party near Tahoe National Forest on August 6, 2022, setting off a search that gripped true-crime watchers across California and beyond. Her body was found on August 21, 2022, inside her submerged SUV in Prosser Creek Reservoir, and the Nevada County Sheriff-Coroner identified her two days later. Authorities ruled her death accidental, saying she drowned and that there was no evidence of foul play.

The lawsuit, filed July 28, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee by Rodni’s father, Daniel Rodni, and grandfather, David Robertson, centered on a video Upchurch posted on August 28, 2022. Court filings say he called the sheriff’s office that identified Rodni a “fake police department” and claimed the disappearance itself was fake. The family also alleged that he suggested they were running a GoFundMe scam and shared personal information about relatives.

That combination, the family’s legal team argued, went far beyond speculation about a high-profile missing-person case. It turned an already devastating search into a stream of falsehoods aimed at real people in the middle of what was, for them, a death investigation and a public tragedy.

Upchurch’s attorneys said after the verdict that he expressed “heartfelt sympathy” for the family and emphasized free speech. Reports after the trial said an appeal was likely. For creators in the true-crime ecosystem, the verdict drew a hard line around what happens when commentary stops being commentary and starts targeting a family with claims that a disappearance was staged, a police department was fake, and grief itself was part of a scam.