A lawsuit filed by McGuireWoods on behalf of a University of Tennessee student is drawing national media attention and could reshape how courts protect private individuals from digital identity theft. Reuters, Bloomberg Law, MLex, CyberScoop and the New York Post covered the case, along with syndicated television program “Inside Edition” and Knoxville stations WATE and WVLT.
The case targets the operators of social media and dating app Meete, alleging they stole a TikTok video that plaintiff Kaelyn Lunglhofer posted on her high school graduation day and — without her knowledge or consent — transformed it into a sexually suggestive advertisement that is geotargeted to men near her, including residents in her college dormitory.
McGuireWoods partners Abram Pafford, a member of the firm’s Government Investigations & White Collar Litigation Practice Group, and Lucy Jewett Wheatley, co-leader of the firm’s Intellectual Property Practice Group, spearhead the team, which also includes associates Joie Johnston and James Hornsby.
The complaint against British Virgin Islands-based Quantum Communications Development Limited and two China-based affiliates asserts violations of Tennessee’s Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security (ELVIS) Act — one of the nation’s strongest right-of-publicity statutes — as well as Tennessee common law and the federal Lanham Act.
The case “raises a question that courts are confronting more often: whether right-of-publicity laws — once most closely associated with celebrities and athletes — can also protect private individuals whose likenesses are used without permission for commercial gain,” Reuters columnist Jenna Greene wrote in a May 7, 2026, article.
Social media has complicated that distinction, Wheatley said, because “lots of people now have a valuable commercial right of publicity to protect.”
In a May 1, 2026, interview with WATE, Pafford described the gravity of the defendants’ conduct: “For what this app is selling, to sort of enlist a teenager as an involuntary spokesperson for their product without consent, without permission, and then to target people around her with that ad to try to deceive them, is about as bad as it gets in terms of this type of conduct.”
Lunglhofer learned of the ad when a male resident in her dorm sent it to her on Snapchat. “I felt so embarrassed and mortified,” she told WATE.
Pafford emphasized the case’s broader implications. “The way of doing it, and the impact, is new,” he told MLex, noting that the geotargeting element “is what makes it particularly egregious, and particularly dangerous. You’re taking a teenager’s image, putting it into this kind of ad without her knowledge, and then delivering it to men who are physically near her — people she may interact with, without knowing what they’ve seen.”