Texas Tech, two Tech faculty members and the United States Chess Federation are among the parties involved in a $20 million identity-theft lawsuit.
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 Sam Sloan, the plaintiff in the suit and an independent book publisher who resides in the Bronx, N.Y.
In documents provided by Sloan through an e-mail, he claims Polgar and Truong, who are members of the USCF, played a role in posting offensive comments under his name.
He said the actions he believes Polgar and Truong committed were damaging 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, Sloan said.
A clerk at New York's southern district court confirmed that the lawsuit, Sloan v. Truong, was filed Tuesday but said the official complaint is not available because it is a pro se lawsuit as Sloan is representing himself.
Sloan said he filed the lawsuit against Tech as well as the faculty members because he believes computers at the university were used to post offensive comments on the user forum of the USCF Web site, www.uschess.org.
"The evidence is that (Truong) was posting comments from Texas Tech University's computers," Sloan said. "He actually logged in from a computer in the block of IP numbers that belong to Texas Tech."
Truong, who was elected as an executive board member of the federation in June, said he believes Sloan is not a credible source of information and does not believe the lawsuit will succeed.
"There's nothing in there to even merit to have a case be heard," Truong said of Sloan's lawsuit. "He has zero evidence. It's a matter of the guy just basically trying to ram and vent his anger out with something like all of these pages for the court."
Truong said Polgar was elected chairman of the federation in June.
Sloan said the offensive posts made under his name began in June 2005 and continued through September 2007.
"The first posts were rather mild and weren't really serious," he said. "In fact, they were almost postings I might have made myself, and I had to check to make sure I didn't actually do it myself. But then later on they became vehement, saying (a USCF member) was a bull dyke and attacking the sexual preferences of almost everybody."
Victor Mellinger, senior associate general counsel at Tech, said the university had not been presented with the lawsuit and did not want to speculate about its ramifications.
"If we've been sued, we'll send it to the Attorney General's Office, just like we do every other lawsuit, and they represent us," he said.
Though the university had not been presented with the lawsuit, Mellinger said he was familiar with aspects of it.
He said some of the events questioned in the lawsuit predate when Polgar and Truong began working at Tech.
"I haven't seen anything that relates to a Texas Tech computer," Mellinger said. "It may be there, but I haven't seen it yet."
Polgar said she believes Sloan's lawsuit does not have merit and did not want to make further comment.
The USCF is a not-for-profit membership organization devoted to extending the role of chess in American society, according to its Web site.
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