Kayle Leogrande is an American cyclist on the controversial domestic team Rock Racing. A tattoo artist in California, he has brightly-colored designs running up his arms and legs. But the ink that is making him notorious in his sport might be the ink he is spilling in a barrage of lawsuits.
Leogrande recently served a defamation complaint upon Matt DeCanio, a fellow professional cyclist, and Suzanne Sonye, a former staff member for the Rock Racing team – which is stocked with several riders tainted by doping scandals, including 2004 Olympic gold medalist Tyler Hamilton.
The complaint, which seeks punitive damages from DeCanio and Sonye for “false and wildly incredible allegations,” also named defendants “DOES 1-30, inclusive” – meaning Leogrande and his lawyer are positioned to sue 30 more people if that’s what it takes.
That would be on top of a pending lawsuit against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Leogrande is generally believed to be “John Doe” in a complaint filed in January against the USADA, seeking to stop the agency from testing a secondary urine sample of his from last year, even though he appears to have passed the test on the first sample.
What was the alleged slander? In a December phone call, Sonye told DeCanio that Leogrande was a doper and had admitted it to her while she was working for Rock Racing as a soigneur in 2007 (she quit in January, and the tape became public in February).
DeCanio, an outspoken anti-doping activist, recorded the phone call and posted it on his Web site, stolenunderground.com. He did this without Sonye’s permission, she says (technically, that may have been a wiretapping crime).
DeCanio and Sonye, although now co-defendants, are not in contact anymore. After the phone call was posted online, Sonye’s lawyer Jean-Jacques Cabou sent DeCanio a cease-and-desist letter. DeCanio took the call off his site, but hasn’t turned over all copies of it, Cabou said Friday.
The plot was already thick in this case: Leogrande is currently in the middle of doping arbitration with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, and Sonye has submitted a sworn affidavit in that case, alleging that Leogrande sought help finding testosterone patches and confessed to having once sabotaged a drug test by spiking a urine sample with soap.
This means Sonye is now being sued for saying, in a phone call she said she thought was private, the same things she laid out in a notarized affidavit.
“I’m trying not to let myself be intimidated by anybody,” said Sonye in an interview Friday.
