A judge upheld a private arbitration ruling that ordered former USC running back Reggie Bush to pay around $1.4 million for comments he made in 2022 about former sports marketer Lloyd Lake. The judge’s decision June 18 stems from the larger scandal that separated Bush from his Heisman Trophy for 14 years.

Lake filed the complaint in February 2023 alongside his parents Roy and Barbara Gunner alleging that Bush’s comments went against a non-disparagement clause of their previous settlement. Bush’s comments on social media and the I AM ATHLETE podcast included claims that Lake sought to blackmail him and that Lake was a convicted felon whose criminal record was “as long as the Cheesecake Factory menu.”

Some of the foundational pieces of the 2023 complaint included that the Gunners’ home was vandalized with a message about giving Bush back his Heisman, something the family claimed was a result of Bush’s incendiary comments that same week.

Lake’s legal team originally wanted to take the issue to trial before it was taken to confidential private arbitration as agreed in the two men’s original settlement. This is the latest in what Lake has said for years is his largest struggle relating to the case: the public’s perception of him.

“People who aren’t really familiar with the case and hear rumors, they get upset because they think I was trying to take advantage of Reggie,” Lake said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2018. “That’s absolutely what it wasn’t. … It took a lot out of me going through it. You’ve got to deal with the rumors and the lies.”

The NCAA in 2010 found that Bush accepted improper benefits from Lake and others who expected to represent him at their agency in exchange, including cash, a car and a rent-free stay at a house for his family. On an episode of the “I AM ATHLETE” podcast published in September 2022, Bush challenged the description.

“My parents come home one day, eviction letter on the door, they got to move out. Not because they weren’t paying rent but because the owners weren’t paying the mortgage,” Bush said about the circumstances leading up to his parents moving into the home.

The house, Bush said, was owned by a family friend who was willing to help his family stay there until they found out where to go next, as a short-term solution. Bush claimed the NCAA never found that detail during its years-long investigation.

“[That] was the house that the NCAA plastered all across the world as if this was a house that was given to us as a part of … my name, image and likeness being sold,” Bush said. “They didn’t do their homework. It’s a sloppy investigation, everything about the investigation was sloppy.”

Lake has spoken about the public legal battles with Bush and cases that have impacted other people at USC football. After Todd McNair, a former assistant coach implicated in the NCAA’s investigation, lost a defamation case against the organization in 2018, Lake said he had hoped McNair would win.

The massive fallout for people like McNair and Bush, and USC as a whole, could have been avoided, Lake said, if Bush had agreed to give him the money he felt he was owed from the benefits that became the center of their trial and the NCAA’s investigation.

“I didn’t want the NCAA to hit [USC]. I didn’t want Reggie to lose his Heisman Trophy. I didn’t want any of this. It was just a business deal that he could have easily settled because it was a small amount of money and he ended up paying millions of dollars fighting it and ended up settling anyway. It never made any sense to me,” Lake said.