LOUISVILLE (LN) — A federal magistrate judge in the Western District of Kentucky on Tuesday sanctioned a Kentucky man for a sustained pattern of discovery abuse that included forging his wife's and son's signatures on discovery verifications, withholding access to a key email account, and feeding false information to his own lawyers — but stopped short of entering the default judgment that plaintiff Faye Ricci sought, reopening discovery instead and ordering the defendants to pay her attorney's fees.
The ruling in Ricci v. Scott, filed in the Louisville Division, stems from a harassment and extortion lawsuit Ricci brought in February 2023 after she began receiving threatening emails from an account registered to a fictitious "Kelly Spencer" that were copied to her boss, coworkers, and colleagues, her son's former employer, and one of her husband's clients. The emails demanded her son vacate a college apartment by February 11, 2022, or face further exposure of sexual assault allegations that had already been withdrawn and never charged.
Ricci traced the account through Google and GoDaddy subpoenas to defendant Clark Scott, the father of her son's roommate Wyatt Scott. Clark confirmed as much in a July 2022 email to Ricci's attorney, Andrew Stebbins, saying he was "fully prepared to legal up in Kentucky and prepare for a long public legal circus." Before the complaint was even filed, Clark told Stebbins he was "the only one that knows about the emails" and was "willing to spend twice as much [as any settlement offer] having fun defending all this and bringing to light any possible wrong doing."
The day after Ricci filed suit, a man named Jeffrey Sexton, identifying himself as Clark's attorney, emailed Stebbins warning him to "contemplate the meaning of 'let sleeping dogs lie'" and suggesting that litigation would force Ricci's son to answer questions about whether he had ever been the subject of a lawsuit. Sexton did not enter an appearance on the record.
What followed, the court found, was a sustained pattern of evasive and misleading behavior by Clark to obstruct the case. He told his lawyers the "Kelly Spencer" account had been deleted before the lawsuit was filed and that he no longer had login access — a claim the court found inconsistent with Google subpoena results showing the account remained active as recently as two months before the complaint was filed. He testified at his September 2024 deposition that he did not use a VPN or access the account through Amazon Web Services, testimony that conflicted with the subpoena data. He signed Kelly and Wyatt Scott's discovery verifications himself, without their knowledge, creating the false impression they had personally reviewed and approved the responses. He told his lawyers that Kelly and Wyatt were aware of the litigation and had participated in preparing their responses — representations the court found to be false.
Kelly and Wyatt testified at their March 2025 depositions that they did not learn of the lawsuit until 2024, at least a year after it was filed. They said Clark never reviewed discovery responses or searched for information with them, that they did not communicate with counsel until January 2025, and that they did not recognize the signatures on their own verifications.
The court found Clark's conduct amounted to willful bad faith, describing the record as displaying a pattern of evasive and misleading behavior and stating it was "hard to believe that his conduct was anything but an intentional attempt to thwart Ricci's ability to fully investigate her claims." As for Kelly and Wyatt, the court found their near-total disengagement from a lawsuit in which they were named defendants demonstrated "a clear disregard for the effect of their conduct on these proceedings," though it stopped short of finding bad faith on their part.
Despite those findings, the court declined to enter default judgment, citing the absence of prior warnings to Kelly and Wyatt, the differing levels of fault among the three defendants, and a preference for resolving cases on the merits. The court also denied Ricci's request for sanctions against former defense firms Boehl Stopher & Graves and Stites & Harbison, finding that Clark had deceived his own lawyers as thoroughly as he had deceived the court and opposing counsel. The court noted that the Sixth Circuit has held that courts lack authority to sanction a law firm under Rule 37 because the rule explicitly refers to sanctioning the party and their attorney, and found the record did not show either firm knew of Clark's efforts to mislead them.
The court was not entirely without criticism for the firms. In a pointed passage, it observed that lawyers from two separate firms had represented Kelly and Wyatt Scott without ever meeting or speaking with them before engaging in discovery and general representation on their behalf, relying entirely on Clark as their point of contact. "Had counsel simply spoken with each client from the outset of this litigation," the court wrote, "some (if not all) of this mess may well have been avoided."
The court reopened discovery for ninety days, ordering forensic imaging of Clark and Wyatt's remaining electronic devices and allowing Ricci to re-depose all three defendants — with Clark footing the bill. The denial of default judgment was entered without prejudice, and the court warned the defendants explicitly that renewed misconduct could result in sanctions that may include and range up to default judgment.
A May 2025 Google subpoena return added one more wrinkle: the "Kelly Spencer" account had never been deleted, and its recovery email had been quietly changed from "kelly@kellyscott.com" to "clark@clarkscott.com" sometime after December 2022.