The Daily Toreador
Adam Young
Issue date: 10/24/07
Section: News
Though a $20 million identity-theft lawsuit involving Texas Tech, two Tech employees and the United States Chess Federation has not officially been served to the university, its accusations are blamed for $10,000 in lost sponsorship.
A lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York names the university and faculty members Susan Polgar, a managing director in the Office of the Provost, and Paul Truong, a unit associate director in the Office of the Provost, as defendants of the suit, according to court documents provided by Tech's Office of General Counsel and Sam Sloan, the plaintiff in the suit and an independent book publisher who resides in the Bronx, N.Y.
According to documents provided by Tech, Sloan accuses Truong of posting obscene comments under Sloan's name on multiple Internet forums, including the USCF blog, while using Tech computers.
Victor Mellinger, senior associate general counsel at Tech, said the university had not officially been served with the lawsuit as of Tuesday and did know how the university obtained the court documents.
Though Sloan did not return phone calls Tuesday, on Oct. 4 he said he has proof that many of the 3,000 comments made using his name between June 2005 and September 2007 were made from IP addresses owned by Tech.
However, Jim Brink, vice provost at Tech, said he and officials with the university's Information Technology department do not believe Sloan's accusations are valid.
"We change our IP addresses frequently, and so these evidently all came from the same IP address," he said. "You don't even know, when you send something, what IP address there is because we're constantly changing them."
Mellinger said federal law would protect the university from liability if the comments were posted from Tech computers. Sloan said the actions he believes Polgar and Truong committed damaged his reputation because they were made during the time frame of USCF board-member elections in July.
Sloan, Polgar and Truong were campaigning for executive board seats, with Sloan running for re-election, he said.
Polgar and Truong, who are married, denied the allegations Sloan made against them.
Though Polgar said the allegations are untrue, she believes they have damaged her reputation and potentially lost $10,000 in sponsorship money from a private donor for a series of chess tournaments to be hosted Nov. 9 through Nov. 16 at Tech.
"I understand that (the potential donor) may not want to be associated right now with the event because of the accusations, and I'm hoping that maybe sometime in the future he'll come back to sponsor other chess events," she said, "but in the mean time, we are finding other sponsors."
Polgar said the Susan Polgar National Open for Girls, Boys and International Open is cosponsored and co-organized by the Susan Polgar Foundation, Tech Knight Raiders chess club and the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, and despite the initial loss of some funding, is scheduled to continue.
"The event is going on as planned because the community is very supportive, including the Lubbock Visitor's Bureau and other private sponsors locally and outside of Lubbock," she said.
Though the lawsuit has brought unwanted negative publicity to the university, Brink said it has not jeopardized Polgar and Truong's futures at Tech.
"We have not changed our attitude toward them nor our expectations of the fruitfulness this relationship can bare one bit as the result of this," he said.