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A 21-year-old college student got an unexpected surprise when he was recently threatened with legal action by Taylor Swift’s lawyers.
Jack Sweeney, a junior at the University of Central Florida, received a cease and desist order telling him to stop tracking her private jets and posting about it on social media.
The Washington Post reports that Sweeney received a cease-and-desist letter from Taylor Swift’s attorney at the Washington law firm Venable telling him that they would “have no choice but to pursue any and all legal remedies” if he did not stop his “stalking and harassing behavior.”
According to Taylor Swift’s attorney Katie Wright Morrone, Sweeney’s tracking and posting about her private jets are causing her and her family “direct and irreparable harm, as well as emotional and physical distress” putting her in a “constant state of fear for her personal safety.”
“While this may be a game to you, or an avenue that you hope will earn you wealth or fame, it is a life-or-death matter for our Client,” Morrone wrote in the letter.
The letter also claimed that Sweeney was “in violation of several state laws” without actually citing any.
Morrone also claimed that Sweeney’s tracking and posting the whereabouts of Taylor Swift’s private jets serves “no legitimate interest in or public need for this information, other than to stalk, harass, and exert dominion and control.”
Sweeney merely posts publicly available information from the Federal Aviation Administration as well as hobbyists who track the planes using a widely available ADS-B receiver to pick up the signals they broadcast.
“This information is already out there,” Sweeney told the Post. “Her team thinks they can control the world.”
Despite that, Facebook and Instagram disabled Sweeney’s accounts which tracked Taylor Swift’s jets.
Sweeney’s accounts have in recent months tracked two jets that were owned by Nashville-based companies and registered to be operated by a Swift company called Firefly Entertainment, according to FAA documents. They do not track who travels on the planes or any other chartered flights.
Sweeney still posts updates about Taylor Swift’s air travel on Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram and other platforms, including X (formerly Twitter).
“This isn’t about putting a GPS tracker on someone and invading their privacy. It’s using public information to track the jet of a public figure,” said Sweeney’s attorney James Slater. “This is their means to try to quash a PR issue and bully my client to have the bad coverage die down.”
Swift has been cited by multiple watchdog organizations for her frequent private jet trips and in 2022 was named the “biggest celebrity [carbon dioxide] polluter” by one group.
This also isn’t the first time Jack Sweeney has been the subject of such claims.
In 2022, he was running a Twitter account that tracked Elon Musk’s private jet flights. Musk suspended that account, despite having previously stated that his “commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.”
Sweeney now posts Musk’s and Swift’s flight updates with a 24-hour delay on the platform.