TITUSVILLE, Fla. – A person has filed a defamation lawsuit towards a Florida sheriff who posts weekly “Wheel of Fugitive” movies on social media, saying that he wasn’t a fugitive when his identify and picture appeared a number of occasions in 2021 within the sheriff’s posts impressed by the long-running TV sport present “Wheel of Fortune.”
Because of the sheriff’s posts, David Gay misplaced a job and suffered emotional misery, in line with the lawsuit looking for greater than $50,000 in damages. The lawsuit was filed final week in state courtroom in Brevard County, alongside Florida’s Space Coast.
Gay’s potential boss known as him as he was driving to his first day of work and informed him to not hassle exhibiting up as he had seen Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey’s “Wheel of Fugitive” videos, the lawsuit said.
A spokesman for the sheriff’s office on Monday didn’t respond to an emailed inquiry seeking comment about the lawsuit.
In the videos posted to social media, Ivey spins a wheel with photos of what are described as 10 of the county’s most wanted fugitives.
“Everybody watches it. Even the fugitives watch it” to see who turns into “fugitive of the week,” The Associated Press reported Ivey said.
Gay was involved in the court system for an undisclosed offense and was sentenced in November 2020 to three years of probation for a withhold of adjudication, a special sentence in which a defendant is not formally convicted of an offense, the lawsuit said.
Gay was taken into custody for violation of probation in January 2021 after he had been arrested several weeks earlier on a misdemeanor domestic battery charge. He says he believed his father had gotten into a physical altercation with his mother, and the case was dismissed eventually.
However, whereas Gay was in jail for the violation of probation arrest, Ivey mentioned in a “Wheel of Fugitive” video that Gay was a fugitive, when in reality he was already in the Brevard County Jail, according to the lawsuit.
Gay was featured in three more episodes of “Wheel of Fugitive,” together with on the day after he was sentenced to probation below the identical phrases that beforehand had been imposed and was launched from custody, the lawsuit mentioned.
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