McGuireWoods partner Abe Pafford was quoted in a May 29, 2026, Nashville Post article examining a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a University of Tennessee student that could reshape how courts protect private individuals from digital identity theft.
The case, filed by McGuireWoods on behalf of University of Tennessee student Kaelyn Lunglhofer, targets the operators of social media and dating app Meete. The lawsuit alleges the defendants stole a TikTok video Lunglhofer posted on her high school graduation day and — without her knowledge or consent — transformed it into a sexually suggestive advertisement geotargeted to men near her, including residents in her college dormitory. The first-of-its-kind case has attracted national media coverage.
“One of the baseline rules that has existed in one form or another for probably hundreds of years is that even if you put out some creative content for public consumption, you’re not authorizing companies to take the content and use it for their own advertising purposes without compensating you,” Pafford told the Nashville Post. “And you’re especially not authorizing them to do that in a deceptive way that implies that you might endorse a product or a service that you do not endorse.”
The lawsuit brings claims under the federal Lanham Act, Tennessee’s ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act), and Tennessee common law claims for defamation and right of publicity.
Pafford, a member of the firm’s Government Investigations & White Collar Litigation Practice Group, said new technologies raise new legal questions related to image and likeness, and outcomes of cases like Lunglhofer’s could provide guidance to other courts.
“One of the areas where the case is important is kind of this new line drawing and the court sort of figuring out how to handle the fact that what used to be either purely a public figure, a celebrity or a private person who has no following, whose image and likeness isn’t really worth a whole lot used to be very black and white. That is now in the gray for a lot of people, given how people create and share content and what it’s used for,” Pafford said.
Pafford is joined on the McGuireWoods team by partner Lucy Jewett Wheatley, co-leader of the firm’s Intellectual Property Practice Group, along with associates Joie Johnston and James Hornsby.