- Getting sued for making frivolous claims about a high-profile murder case on social media? Not even a psychic could’ve seen that coming!
Accusing someone of any crime is no laughing matter. But if you claim a person is a murderer, you’d better have some strong, hard facts to back it up.
As it turns out, tarot cards aren’t sufficient proof in a murder case.
In 2022, four University of Idaho students were killed in what has become known very literally as the 2022 University of Idaho murders. A home invader brutally stabbed the house-sharing students to death, while inexplicably leaving two other housemates alive.
Soon after the killings, Ashley Guillard, a social media psychic from Texas, posted on TikTok, saying she had cracked the case. She made multiple posts accusing Rebecca Scofield, a history professor at the U of I, of masterminding the murders to conceal a supposed relationship with one of the students.
Guillard figured this all out, of course, by consulting the most reliable source of them all — her tarot cards.
Things took an awkward turn for her when the cops arrested Bryan Kohberger for committing the murders. Fast-forward to late 2025, and Kohberger submitted a guilty plea, confessing to his crimes.
Scofield, however, wasn’t about to take the accusations lying down. She sued Guillard, and the latter was recently ordered to pay Scofield $10 million in compensation.
Now, Guillard has appealed to the courts to have the verdict against her thrown out. She claims the whole case is “fraudulent” and wishes everyone could just “move on.”
The Murder
The U of I murders took place in the early morning of November 13, 2022. Five students from the university shared an off-campus house in the city of Moscow, Idaho: Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, Bethany Funke, and Dylan Mortensen. On the night, Kernodle’s boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, was also at the house.
Of the six, four would not live to see the next sunrise.
Around 4 a.m., all people in the house were either sleeping and/or fairly heavily intoxicated. Then, a black-clad masked assailant entered the house.
Over the next 25 minutes, the person would brutally stab Mogen, Goncalves, Chapin, and Kernodle to death. The killings were savage, with some of the victims suffering more than 50 stab wounds.
Mortensen and Funke saw the murderer, but in their drunken state, couldn’t completely process what was happening and hid in an empty room. It took until the next morning for the true horror of the situation to become clear.
The TikTok Divination
As the Moscow Police Department (MPD), supported by the Idaho State Police and the FBI, began investigating the case, so did Guillaurd. The psychic, who performed tarot readings on social media, consulted her cards.
They, apparently, told her that Scofield was in a relationship with one of the murdered students. She also allegedly divined that Scofield had ordered the killings to hide the affair.
Guillard then decided that the world had to know what the cards had told her. From November 25, 2022, onward, Guillard made several posts over the next year or so, accusing Scofield of being the perpetrator.
On November 26, for example, she posted that Scofield had “partnered to kill the four University of Idaho college students.” In a later post, she claimed “REBECCA WAS THE ONE TO INITIATE THE PLAN.”
In early December, she stated that “Rebecca Scofield isn’t remorseful for ordering the murder of the four University of Idaho students.” She also added, “Rebecca Scofield is going to prison for the murder of the four University of Idaho Students.”
I could go on, but you get the drift. In long TikTok rants, Guillard claimed Scofield was engaged in a “sugar momma” situation with one of the students.
The Real Murderer
And then came December 30, 2022. Bryan Kohberger, a criminal justice student at Washington State University, was arrested in his parents’ home in Pennsylvania while he was disposing of his murder gear in the kitchen.
I won’t go into the lengthy court case in detail. Long story short, no motive has ever been discovered for why Kohberger committed murders.
However, in July 2025, he pleaded guilty to the murders in a deal to avoid the death penalty. Later that month, he was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences without parole.
Despite Kohberger’s arrest and the following public court case, Guillard kept insisting on TikTok and other social media platforms that Scofield was the real culprit. Eventually, Scofield had had enough, and she sued Guillard for defamation, fearing that some nutcase could be inspired to take vengeance on her for a crime she had nothing to do with.
Guillard took the threat of legal action in a calm and collected manner. Just kidding, she doubled down on her claims.
“I am in court because I told the truth and that person, Scofield, is threatened by me and the things that I say. So anyway, I tell the truth,” Guillard said in an October 14, 2023, video posted on YouTube, well after Kohberger’s arrest.
The Sentence
Taken to court, Guillard chose to represent herself, perhaps to demonstrate her psychic powers. The courts and jury, however, turned out to be skeptics.
On February 27, 2026, a federal jury in Boise found that Guillard had been spreading false claims about Scofield. She was ordered to pay Scofield $2.5 million in compensation and $7.5 million in punitive damages. That totals a nice, round $10 million.
Scofield’s attorney also moved for Guillard to pay her $165,000 fee.
For her part, Guillard has chosen to fight the judgment. In an April 6 motion to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco (again representing herself), she dubbed the entire case against her “fraudulent.”
Guillard claims that “Scofield lied about having damages, presented false evidence in Court to the judge and jury, filed fabricated medical records falsely portraying as damages related to this case and presented witnesses who also lied under oath to fabricate damages.”
She claimed that she had no choice but to appeal, stating that she wished “that we all could move on.”