Joe Gibbs Racing isn’t messing around, pushing for major sanctions against Chris Gabehart and Spire, along with contempt of court hearings, all centered on text messages JGR says were deleted to hide critical evidence. This whole situation is spiraling, and it could get ugly for Gabehart when it goes to trial in February.
Deleted Messages: What JGR Says Happened
The core of JGR’s argument is that Gabehart intentionally deleted a seven-message text thread he had with Spire Motorsports co-owner Jeff Dickerson back on November 15. JGR wants the court to allow the trial jury to consider an ‘adverse inference’ argument. What’s that mean? Basically, the judge could tell the jury they can assume those deleted texts were hiding evidence that would look really bad for Gabehart and Spire. JGR claims they tried every channel to get those messages through legal discovery, but couldn’t get them from either Gabehart’s or Dickerson’s phone carriers. JGR is flat out accusing Gabehart of deleting relevant texts *before* a lawsuit. Yikes.
For his part, Gabehart claims those texts were just the framework of the job offer that eventually landed him the Chief Motorsports Officer role at Spire. He says he deleted them because he felt uneasy getting that offer while he was still negotiating his separation from Joe Gibbs Racing. Meanwhile, Dickerson said all his text messages were set to automatically delete after 30 days anyway, just to manage bulk. But JGR is going for the jugular, seeking sanctions because litigants are not allowed to delete anything subject to discovery once they suspect they might be involved in a lawsuit. The big hang-up? Gabehart and JGR can’t agree on *when* he should have suspected litigation was coming.
The Defense Strikes Back: “No Evidence, Just Assumptions”
Spire and Gabehart are firing back, saying JGR is just grasping at straws. Gabehart’s lawyer, Cary Davis, laid it out in a Wednesday night filing: “The Motion’s real purpose is transparent. Having found no evidence that Mr. Gabehart shared JGR proprietary information with Spire,and facing sworn testimony from both Mr. Gabehart and Mr. Dickerson that none was shared,JGR asks the Court to tell the jury to assume such evidence existed, and existed only in seven deleted texts. That is not a remedy for lost evidence; it is a substitute for evidence JGR never had. JGR remains free to cross-examine Mr. Gabehart about the deletion at trial; it is not entitled to have the Court do its persuading for it.”
That’s a pretty strong claim, essentially saying JGR is trying to have the court do their dirty work because they can’t prove their case. The defense is arguing that JGR has yet to show any unarguable proof that Dickerson has actually used any trade secrets while at Spire. Plus, the three parties still haven’t even agreed on what truly constitutes a “trade secret” in this whole mess.
Trade Secrets and the Timing Tangle
While the text deletion is a huge part of this, there’s also the matter of trade secrets. It’s an accepted fact by the court that Gabehart took photographs of numerous trade-secreted material or otherwise placed files on his personal drives during November. Joe Gibbs Racing uncovered this through a forensic analysis of the devices Gabehart turned over. This is big, and it’s a critical piece of JGR’s argument that Gabehart misappropriated trade secrets.
However, Gabehart has maintained that any trade secrets he misappropriated were either turned over to JGR or deleted once they were discovered. So, it’s not a matter of *if* he took them, but *what he did with them after*. This whole situation is a tangled mess of deleted messages, accusations of stolen secrets, and a fundamental disagreement on when someone should have known a lawsuit was coming.
The trial jury is set for February, and you know JGR is going to push hard for that ‘adverse inference’ argument. It’s going to be a tense few months leading up to that, with Gabehart and Spire fighting tooth and nail against these sanctions and the serious implications they could carry.
This article was created with AI assistance and published under Seattle On Tap’s editorial standards. See our Editorial Policy.
Originally reported by Yahoo Sports.
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