Florida sheriff sued for defamation of ‘Runaway Wheel’

TITUSVILLE, Florida. – A man has filed a defamation lawsuit against a Florida sheriff who posts weekly “Runaway Wheel” videos on social media, saying he was not a fugitive when his name and image appeared several times in 2021 in sheriff posts inspired by the long-running TV game show “Wheel of Fortune”.

According to the lawsuit seeking more than $50,000 in damages, the sheriff’s posts caused David Gay to lose his job and suffer from emotional distress. The lawsuit was filed last week in state court in Brevard County, on Florida’s Space Coast.

Gay’s alleged boss called him as he was driving to his first day of work and told him not to worry about showing up because he saw Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey’s “Wheel of Fugitive” video, the lawsuit says.

A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office on Monday did not respond to an emailed request for comment on the lawsuit.

In videos posted on social media, Ivy spins the wheel with pictures of what are described as the county’s 10 most wanted fugitives.

“Everyone is watching. Even fugitives are watching it” to see who will be the “fugitive of the week,” the Associated Press reported, Ivey said.

Gay was involved in the judiciary for an undisclosed offense and was sentenced in November 2020 to three years of probation for refusing to adjudicate, a special sentence in which the defendant is not formally convicted of a crime, the lawsuit says.

Gay was taken into custody for violating probation in January 2021, after he had been arrested a few weeks earlier on domestic offense charges. He says he believed his father got into a physical altercation with his mother and the case was eventually dropped.

However, while Gay was in jail for violating probation, Ivey said in the “Wheel of Fugitive” video that Gay was a fugitive when in fact he was already in the Brevard County Jail, according to the lawsuit.

Gay was featured in three more episodes of Fugitive Wheel, including the day after he was placed on probation under the same conditions as earlier and was released from custody, the lawsuit says.

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texasstandard.news contributed to this report.

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