Litigious LR5 board member sued store in 2013 where he was accused of assaulting someone
Two lawsuits brought by a school board member against constituents who criticized him on Facebook are not the first time Ken Loveless has sued someone over challenges to his reputation.
In 2013, Loveless filed suit against cellphone company Sprint after a confrontation with employees at a store on Knox Abbott Drive resulted in an assault charge against Loveless himself.
Loveless sued the company and a leading employee of the Knox Abbott store accusing them of false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, abuse of process, slander and negligence.
In a deposition for the lawsuit, Loveless said he went to the store on April 2, 2012, to pick up a replacement battery for his phone. An employee told him he must return the old battery first, which Loveless insisted he had already done.
“He didn’t want to see my receipt,” Loveless said in a deposition for the suit. “He told me I had to turn in a battery out of my cell phone, and I told him they had taken a battery out of my cell phone, and he said that ‘We wouldn’t have done that.’ I said, ‘But you did do that.’”
In response to a request for comment, Loveless’ attorney responded with a statement as well as a request that The State not contact him for any purpose.
In the statement, Loveless said he is unable to comment on the Sprint suit because of a nondisclosure agreement but defended his decision to sue.
“Needless to say, I do not condone bullying and my goal has been to react appropriately when someone attempts to bully me,” Loveless said. “I filed suit against Sprint when necessary, and I have recently filed additional suits to stop defamatory statements being made against me.”
In his role as school board vice chairman, Loveless recently has sued two constituents of the Lexington-Richland 5 school district for alleged defamatory statements made about him in an online Facebook group, which temporarily shut down user activity after its administrator was sued over comments made there.
“I will not tolerate bullying, defamation or other wrongful actions against me,” Loveless said. “The current lawsuits, as well as the Sprint lawsuit, are evidence that I want the students, the parents and the staff to know about and to appreciate as efforts by me to insure the truth is what leads us all as we strive collectively to maintain and even improve our great school district.”
In his deposition for the Sprint suit, Loveless said the store had mailed off his old cellphone battery days earlier, and he returned to the store when told his new battery was in, only to be told the store had no record of him turning in his old battery.
He asked to see the manager, who repeated that the store had no record of Loveless returning the battery. Loveless described him as “real dismissive.”
“(A)pparently, he was more worried about repairing a phone in the back than he was about ... worrying about me,” he said.
Loveless then took the battery off the counter and attempted to leave, leading an employee to say, “If you leave here with that battery, that’s shoplifting and I’ll prosecute you,” according to the suit.
Two store employees then moved to block Loveless from leaving the store with the battery. Loveless then threw the battery, reportedly striking a 31-year-old woman in the back of the head, according to a statement she later gave to the Cayce Department of Public Safety.
Loveless then left the store saying, “F--- y’all,” according to court documents. When a friend of the woman who was struck confronted Loveless, he said “F--- her,” she told police. Loveless admits in his deposition to swearing at the staff, citing his frustration with the situation.
“(T)hey started screaming at me that I was a jerk and I was a big SOB and they were going to, you know, see to it that I was punished and all this,” Loveless said in his deposition.
As Loveless was leaving the store, the woman’s friend stood behind his car to get a photo of his license plate. She told police a store employee pulled her out of the way as Loveless was backing up.
Loveless said “all those people” started to “try to keep me from leaving and they were screaming about the police and all that.”
“I drive a Toyota Prius which is not a great big car,” he said. “And I gently backed out and I tried to leave, and I did leave and that was the end of the incident.”
The statements of the two customers to police led to a simple assault charge against Loveless, although the prosecutor ultimately dismissed the charge, according to Sprint’s response to Loveless’s lawsuit.
That didn’t stop Loveless from suing the company on a number of fronts. He said the accusation of shoplifting constituted slander. The assault charge constituted malicious prosecution. And the employees’ attempts to stop him was false imprisonment, with Loveless stating in his deposition that he feared for his life.
“I thought he was going to shoot me in the back,” Loveless said, although there’s no indication from the legal filings that any of the employees were armed. “I really believed that the man was going to shoot me.”
In their response to the suit, Sprint pointed out that it did not own or operate the store in Cayce and wasn’t responsible for its employees. But it also pointed out the employees were within their rights in South Carolina law to stop Loveless from leaving the store with the battery, and they did not detain him after he threw it. They also argued the statement “If you leave here with that battery, that’s shoplifting” is conditional and thus not slanderous.
The assault charge, meanwhile, was based on the police statements of the two women, who were not store employees, the investigating detective said in a deposition.
A judge denied Sprint’s motion to dismiss the suit in June of 2014, but three months later Loveless agreed to drop the case.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comments from Ken Loveless, which were provided to The State after the original publication.
This story was originally published April 5, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
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