YouTuber Ryan Upchurch to pay $17.5M over Kiely Rodni conspiracy videos
A Nashville YouTuber has been ordered to pay the family of Kiely Rodni $17.5 million after a defamation trial about videos he made on the teen’s death.
Rodni’s father and grandfather filed a lawsuit against Ryan Upchurch after he uploaded videos to his YouTube account where he questioned whether the case was real and suggested the family was involved in a scam to raise money through GoFundMe.
Rodni, 16 at the time of her death, disappeared in early August of 2022 after she reportedly attended a party near the Prosser Family Campgrounds in California. Later that month, her body was found in her car in Prosser Lake.
The attorneys for Rodni’s family said the videos spread false claims during a time of intense grief and caused damage to the family’s reputation and emotional distress.
“They felt powerless and victimized. There was nothing they could do to stop these videos,” Chris Smith, one of the Rodni family’s attorneys, said. “These videos were going viral, getting hundreds of thousands of views on a platform that has 3 million followers.”
https://www.newsnationnow.com/entertainm...gment/amp/
A Nashville YouTuber has been ordered to pay the family of Kiely Rodni $17.5 million after a defamation trial about videos he made on the teen’s death.
Rodni’s father and grandfather filed a lawsuit against Ryan Upchurch after he uploaded videos to his YouTube account where he questioned whether the case was real and suggested the family was involved in a scam to raise money through GoFundMe.
Rodni, 16 at the time of her death, disappeared in early August of 2022 after she reportedly attended a party near the Prosser Family Campgrounds in California. Later that month, her body was found in her car in Prosser Lake.
The attorneys for Rodni’s family said the videos spread false claims during a time of intense grief and caused damage to the family’s reputation and emotional distress.
“They felt powerless and victimized. There was nothing they could do to stop these videos,” Chris Smith, one of the Rodni family’s attorneys, said. “These videos were going viral, getting hundreds of thousands of views on a platform that has 3 million followers.”
https://www.newsnationnow.com/entertainm...gment/amp/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
