A federal judge in Chicago has dismissed a $250 million federal lawsuit filed by Rick Butler, one of the nation’s most prominent junior volleyball coaches, against women’s sports advocate and civil rights attorney Nancy Hogshead.
The four-and-a-half-year-old case centered on statements that Hogshead had made in 2017 and 2018 about Butler, who was accused of abusing multiple teenage girls that he had coached during the 1980s. Although Butler did not assert a specific defamation claim against Hogshead, U.S. Magistrate Judge Young B. Kim ruled in his memorandum opinion and order last week that the lawsuit failed because Butler could not establish “actual malice,” the legal standard required for defamatory claims arising from speech about public figures.
In a phone interview with Sportico, Hogshead said she spent “just under a million [dollars]” in legal defense fees, adding: “This has been brutal.”
For decades, Butler and his wife, Cheryl, operated Sports Performance Volleyball Club in Aurora, Ill., the powerhouse club he founded in 1981. Amid renewed scrutiny of the sexual abuse allegations against Rick Butler—spurred in part by Hogshead’s advocacy—the couple sold Sports Performance and its facility, Great Lakes Volleyball Center, in 2022 and relocated to Georgia, where they have since operated their Atlanta Performance Volleyball Club.
