A judge has warned Tonya Craft that she has one more chance to get the paperwork right on her $25 million lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy has told Craft and her legal team to revise the lawsuit twice and he said this is it.
“The court will grant no other opportunities to replead the second amended complaint,” Murphy said in his order, filed on Sept. 15.
The third version of Craft’s lawsuit was filed in North Georgia federal court late Thursday night.
“We feel like we’ve satisfied the judge’s order and, if in fact we haven’t, we’re not sure what else we can do,” said Cary King, one of Craft’s attorneys.
The suit was originally filed in May, a month after Craft, a former Chickamauga Elementary School teacher, was acquitted by a Catoosa County jury on 22 counts of child molestation.
In the suit, Craft claims that her accusers, which include her ex-husband and the Catoosa County Sheriff’s Office, lied under oath during her trial and falsely imprisoned her without any evidence.
She also claims the three girls who accused her — one of whom is her daughter — were manipulated to say Craft had molested them.
But the complaints in the original lawsuit, which includes 15 defendants, did not have enough specific details, Murphy said in his first order, issued in early July.
The lawsuit was rewritten and refiled later in July. But motions flooded in from the defendants, saying the suit didn’t give details that support Craft’s allegations, court documents show.
In response, the judge filed another order, stating the suit needed to be more “simple” and “concise” and each claim needed to be supported with a fact.
“We thought we had corrected what Judge Murphy wanted us to correct, but he thought it needed to be more specific,” King said.
Catoosa County Sheriff Phil Summers said he couldn’t comment on the case except to say “we still feel the claims in this lawsuit are unjustified.”
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