Moneyberg Lost His Defamation Case, Still Suing Strickland

When you lose a defamation case after five years of litigation, most people accept it. Derek Moneyberg apparently did not get that memo.

The lawsuit began in 2021, when Moneyberg filed defamation claims against UFC fighter Sean Strickland, alleging that Strickland made false and damaging statements about him to third parties and on social media. It started with earlier conflicts within the grappling and combat sports community — the kind of interpersonal drama that normally gets resolved at open mat, not in federal court. Moneyberg sued instead.

For five years, the case wound through discovery, depositions, motions, and the full glacial machinery of the American legal system. Both sides accumulated six-figure legal bills. Moneyberg presumably believed the evidence supported his claims. Some court ruled against him. Moneyberg lost.

But here's where it gets interesting: he's still suing. Whether that's an appeal of the original judgment, a new complaint targeting different statements, or some other continuation of legal warfare remains unclear from public filings. What's clear is that the story didn't end with a judgment against him. It just entered a new chapter.

This is, on its face, absurd. It's also instructive about how defamation law actually works, how expensive litigation can destroy judgment, and why the combat sports world keeps producing legal dramas that nobody asked for.

The Original Dispute

The conflict between Moneyberg and Strickland is not a clean narrative. Moneyberg is a respected coach and figure in the grappling world — the kind of person who spent years building credibility, training people, and contributing to the sport. Strickland's a UFC fighter with mainstream visibility and reach. They had a falling out. Eventually it went public.

What exactly Strickland said, and whether it was defamatory, was the entire point of the lawsuit. Strickland apparently made allegations about Moneyberg's conduct or character. Moneyberg denied the allegations and filed suit. The case became a question of what Strickland said, whether it was false, whether Strickland knew it was false (actual malice, in legal terms), and whether it caused Moneyberg measurable harm.

This is where defamation cases often collapse. Even if someone makes a false statement about you, you have to prove damages. You have to prove the defendant knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. You have to prove the statement caused real harm, not just embarrassment or hurt feelings. The bar is deliberately high, especially if you're a public figure or a limited public figure — which Moneyberg arguably is, as a known name in his sport.

Moneyberg apparently couldn't clear it. Or didn't. The judgment went against him.

The Litigation Grind

Five years is a long time to wait for a verdict you lose. It's long enough for legal bills to exceed what you might have hoped to recover. It's long enough to cycle through multiple attorneys, multiple judges if there were transfers, and enough discovery to bury everyone involved in paper. Standard defamation discovery includes social media posts, DMs, emails, statements to third parties — essentially, anything that might touch on what was said and who said it to whom.

For Moneyberg, this meant five years of watching Strickland's legal team argue that the statements were either true, or opinion, or protected speech, or not about him, or didn't cause measurable harm. Or some combination thereof. And the court agreed with the defense.

The magnitude of that failure is hard to overstate. You don't go to federal court thinking you'll lose. You go thinking you have a case. You file a complaint because your attorney told you you have grounds. You spend five years and hundreds of thousands of dollars because you believed you would win. And then you don't.

Most people, at that point, write off the loss. You move on. You tell yourself the system is broken, or the judge was wrong, or the jury didn't understand the evidence. And then you accept it and spend the next five years actually coaching instead of litigating.

Moneyberg apparently decided to keep going.

Still Suing

This is the part that requires explanation. If Moneyberg lost the original case, what "still suing" means depends on the mechanism:

An appeal would challenge the legal reasoning or the jury verdict as unsupported by evidence. But appeals are slow, expensive, and they have a high bar. You can't appeal a jury verdict just because you don't like the outcome. You have to show legal error — that the judge gave wrong jury instructions, that evidence was improperly admitted, that the verdict was so unreasonable no jury could reach it. Most appeals fail. Most appeals cost $50,000 to $150,000.

A new complaint could target different statements by Strickland, or new statements made after the original lawsuit was filed. If Strickland said something new and damaging after 2026, Moneyberg would technically have a fresh cause of action — assuming he could prove damages again. Assuming he could find an attorney willing to file it.

We don't know from public filings which path Moneyberg's taking. But the existence of continued litigation — whether it's an appeal, a new complaint, or some other form of persistence — tells you something important: Moneyberg either believes he has legal grounds to continue, or has decided to continue anyway. Those aren't the same thing.

The Community Cost

Here's what the combat sports community learns from a case like this: litigation is expensive, it takes forever, and you can lose despite believing you're right. And then you can lose again.

Moneyberg's reputation isn't destroyed — he's still known as a coach and contributor to the sport. But five years of legal conflict with Strickland is five years not spent on coaching, on developing his fighters, on the actual work that made him credible in the first place. The court of public opinion doesn't care much about jury verdicts. People have their own read on what happened, and most of them weren't in the courtroom.

Strickland, for his part, got to keep his platform and his fighting career. The lawsuit didn't prevent him from being a professional athlete or building his brand. If anything, he became known for winning a defamation case against someone with standing to sue him — a credential that has some weight in MMA.

For everyone else in the sport, the message is clear: if you're going to have a public dispute with someone, be ready for litigation. Be ready for five years of legal costs. Be ready for discovery that exposes your private communications. Be ready to lose, even if you think you're right. And if you lose, be ready to accept it.

The Persistence Problem

There's a psychological component to this that's worth examining. When you file a lawsuit, you're making a public bet that the law agrees with you. When the law disagrees — when a judge or jury rules against you — that's not just a legal loss. It's a personal loss. You were wrong. The system said so.

The rational response is to accept that you were wrong and move on. The irrational response is to keep fighting. To appeal. To file new complaints. To convince yourself that the next judge, the next jury, the next forum will finally get it right.

Moneyberg, apparently, is in the irrational column. Which is expensive. Which is obsessive. Which is also, in a weird way, kind of admirable if you're the type of person who respects someone for not backing down — even when backing down is the sensible thing to do.

The grappling and MMA worlds have enough real problems. Public disputes that metastasize into a decade of litigation aren't solving anything. They're not making the sport better. They're not making either party richer — they're making the lawyers richer. They're just burning time and money that could go to coaching, training, competing, and building actual community.

But here we are. Moneyberg lost. And he's still fighting. The legal system is designed for that. It doesn't prevent people from appealing bad outcomes. It allows them. Whether Moneyberg wins the next round is almost beside the point. The fact that there IS a next round is the story.

Two people, years of legal machinery, one judgment that should have ended it, and apparently won't.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• Moneyberg v. Strickland — Defamation Case Coverage
• Combat Sports Legal Updates and Litigation Records
• MMA Community Reaction and Analysis