Kiely Rodni was 16 years old when she disappeared on August 6, 2022 after a party at Prosser Family Campground in California. Two weeks later, divers found her body inside her SUV, submerged 55 feet from shore. The coroner determined it was an accidental drowning. No signs of foul play. Case closed for the investigation. Not for Ryan Upchurch. The content creator, with more than three million subscribers on YouTube, posted videos in which he claimed that the entire tragedy was a scam fabricated by Kiely’s family to raise money on GoFundMe. He went further: he claimed that Kiely, her father Daniel, and her grandfather David Robertson did not exist at all, that they were invented characters. While Upchurch racked up views, Daniel Rodni and his wife Lindsey went out every day to search for their daughter and were the first to arrive when she was found underwater. In July 2023, Daniel filed a defamation lawsuit. A jury has just ruled: Upchurch must pay $17.5 million for the emotional and psychological harm caused by those videos. The court described him as a true crime amateur who used other people’s grief as content.