NASCAR’s Winston Cup Museum Owner Under Threat of ‘Criminal Contempt’ as Social Media Fiasco Further Fuels Raging Legal Battle

As the Winston Cup Museum is on the verge of shutting its doors permanently in a few days amid a long-drawn legal battle, owner Will Spencer has landed himself in hot water. What started with the Winston cigarette brand forfeiting sponsorship of NASCAR after 33 years in 2003 is now a lawsuit over rights. The aftermath of it saw the owners announcing that the iconic collection at the museum would be set up for auction, never to return to Salem. However, to add to the already complicated turn of events, Will Spencer has been caught up in legal trouble yet again.

What got Will Spencer into more trouble?

After the original owner of the Winston cigarette brand, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, gave up its rights, the new proprietor, ITG Brands LLC, filed a lawsuit against the museum owners. The two parties were tangled over who rightfully owned the branding, logo, and artifacts inside and outside the museum. In a last-ditch effort to save the museum, the owners had promised a complete rebranding. However, owing to financial constraints, the attempt remained unsuccessful, forcing the owners to give up. But that’s not all, as a new complication seemed to have cropped up.

Things have taken a turn for the worse for Will Spencer as ITG Brands filed a motion requesting a North Carolina court to hold the owner guilty of both criminal and civil contempt. Spencer had apparently shared a YouTube video that discussed the shutdown. ITG called the video, which was originally posted on YouTube by Mitchell Stapleton, “disparaging and defamatory”.

The video was shared on the Winston Cup Museum’s Facebook page on December 1 and has since been removed. If found guilty of contempt, Spencer would face up to $500 in fines and 30 days in prison. If the subject is not purged, he may also end up receiving a prison sentence ranging from 90 days to a year.

Mitchell Stapleton, the creator of the video, expressed his dissatisfaction with the whole scenario on Twitter recently. “This is because they shared my video on the museum pages, not because I made the video. The museum page sharing it is considered by them as an “endorsement” of my personal opinion. Totally insane,” he tweeted.

As the story has taken a new turn, people have raised questions over the content of the video. What was in it to make ITG take such a drastic measure?

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What was said in the video that set ITG off?

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Well, it turns out that the YouTuber Mitchell Stapleton had opined that ITG Brands LLC was apparently bullying Will Spencer into closing the Winston Cup Museum. “Maybe you’ve seen the stuff about the lawsuits surrounding it; the questionable at best United States judicial system has allowed a large company to bully this guy into closing his museum,” he had said.

ITG, however, had a different view of things. The company said that Spencer had made multiple false comments throughout the litigation to make the company look bad and himself the victim. “More broadly, the narrative that Mr. Spencer is the victim of anything other than his own greed is not true,” they had said.

With everything that has come to light so far, it remains to be seen how the situation unfolds. 

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