Case research · C059

Tufano v. Saladino, MD et al

4:25-cv-01960 · U.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania

ClosedDismissedPennsylvania
CourtU.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania
FiledOctober 17, 2025
StatusClosed
OutcomeDismissed
Final dispositionWithout prejudice
JurisdictionPennsylvania
Pro seYes
Current / transferee court—
Transferred case—
Last researchedSeptember 23, 2026

About this case

Evidentiary treatment: This summarizes the plaintiff's own allegations as stated in the complaint or docket record cited below. It reflects what was filed, not a court finding, and is not a determination that the allegations are true.

Proceeding pro se, Tufano filed this complaint on October 17, 2025 — the third of three near-identical suits over the same dispute — against Paul Saladino, M.D., Jeffrey Davis, Esq., White Plains Lodge #473, “the Illuminati,” and, new to this filing, U.S. District Judge Karoline Mehalchick (who had dismissed his first suit against Saladino) and Union Lodge #291.

As in the prior two suits, the complaint alleges Saladino plagiarized his Carnivore Diet research and, with “secret societies” including the Freemasons and Illuminati, conspired to profit from and discredit him; it raises the same five causes of action as C055 — fraud, tortious interference, fraudulent concealment, civil conspiracy, and conspiracy against rights under 18 U.S.C. § 241 — and newly alleges Judge Mehalchick and Union Lodge #291 were involved in unfairly dismissing his earlier case against Saladino. He again seeks damages for the alleged fraud and conspiracy. (The court's opinion in C055 states this case's, C055's, and C048's factual allegations are identical — confirmed near-duplicate filings.)

Complaint / docket source — govinfo.gov ↗

Defendants

Source record

This page separates court/ruling records, party filings, research classifications, secondary sources and public statements. Unknown or unresolved fields remain labelled as such.

Outcome and research status

Outcome reason: Complaint dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. Update 2026-08-25: The report and recommendation (Magistrate Judge Leo A. Latella) and the adopting order (Chief Judge Matthew W. Brann) were both read in full, upgrading this record from a docket snapshot. The order adopts the recommendation, dismisses the complaint without prejudice for lack of jurisdiction, and directs the Clerk to close the case. The recommended grounds are that 18 U.S.C. sec. 241 "do[es] not provide for a private right of action"; that there is no complete diversity because "the Plaintiff alleges that he, Judge Mehalchick, and Union Lodge #291 are all citizens of Pennsylvania"; and that amendment would be futile because "a judicial officer in the performance of his or her duties has absolute immunity from suit."

Research status: Source-backed (report and recommendation and adopting order both read in full via GovInfo)

Research notes: The C055 R&R expressly identifies C059 as a third similar action against the same defendants, making identical factual allegations and raising the same claims as C055; it added Judge Mehalchick after she dismissed C048.

Related litigation

Court & ruling records

Findings recorded only where they are tied to an order, opinion or report and recommendation.

All 83 records →

Record labels distinguish final orders/opinions, reports and recommendations, non-final orders, and tentative/indexed ruling records.

Filing-restriction indicators

Strength labels are research classifications, not judicial declarations that the litigant is vexatious.

StrongThird similar action with same claims / defendants

C055 R&R identifies C059 as a third similar action against the same defendants, making identical factual allegations and raising the same claims as C055; C059 was later dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.

R&R description + final dismissal
Source — govinfo.gov ↗

Chronology events

Sequence does not by itself prove motive or causation.

Third similar complaint filed

Tufano filed a third similar action against the same defendants; it also added Judge Karoline Mehalchick.

Saladino repeated-litigation chain · Judicially confirmed repetitionSource — govinfo.gov ↗
R&R and related dismissal

The C055 R&R recommended dismissal with no further leave to amend; on the same date C059 was dismissed for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction.

Saladino repeated-litigation chain · Judicially confirmed repetitionSource — govinfo.gov ↗

Secondary sources

Commentary from former counsel or other secondary sources is retained separately from court findings and primary-source records.

Saladino v. Frank Tufano 20-cv-9346 – Decision on Mr. Tufano's Motion to Vacate His DefaultFebruary 16, 2026

Davis summarizes the representation/default chronology in C100 and points readers to the Jan. 29, 2026 Opinion & Order. The underlying court record independently confirms counsel was relieved Feb. 23, 2021, no answer was filed, default followed, and the earlier motion to vacate default was denied after the court found willful default and no meritorious defense.

Evidentiary treatment: Blog commentary is secondary. Court findings about default, motions, and representation are recorded in COURT_FINDINGS only where supported by the court opinions/docket.

Jeffrey Davis · Davis Cantor · Former-counsel blog / secondary sourceSecondary source — daviscantor.com ↗

Public video statements

Public statements are displayed separately from court findings. Quotations are transcribed from the video’s own YouTube auto-generated captions and timestamped from the caption cues covering the passage quoted. The Strong / Moderate / Context tier is this project’s research classification of how closely a statement bears on the documented filing patterns — it is not a judicial finding. Any second badge names the filing-restriction factor the statement’s own words describe; it records what the speaker said, not that a court found it.

How quotations are marked: An ellipsis (…) inside a quotation marks words left out between two passages of the same video, which can sit some minutes apart. The omitted wording is not reproduced here, and a clip on the statement supercut plays the whole span from the quotation’s first word to its last — so it includes the omitted material. Quotations without an ellipsis are continuous speech.

These quotations can no longer be checked at their source. Every quotation on this site was transcribed from the speaker’s own YouTube channel. That channel was removed in October 2026; on 23 October 2026 all 980 catalogued video ids returned “not found”, and the channel address itself no longer resolves. YouTube’s own basis for removing it is not part of any record this project can verify, so none is asserted here. Nothing was withdrawn by this project.

What survives is the evidence, not the link. The verbatim caption transcript each quotation was read from was archived, dated, at the time the video was catalogued, and the timestamp on each card is the moment in that transcript where the words appear. The transcripts are held unaltered and are not republished. What a reader can no longer do is open the original and hear it, and nothing on this site can restore that. Seventy-four statements — those whose own words name a core filing-restriction factor — survive as clips in this project’s own compilation, and those cards link into it at the right moment. Nothing else is re-hosted. See Methodology.

Dispute background statement
Moderate pattern relevance00:32

The World is run by Evil People - And I've had Enough · May 13, 2022

what actually triggered this was uh some more uh bot spam on my comments that didn't go through from you know these people that have been harassing me ever since the rat started plagiarizing my videos so i'm not going to name them i'm not going to say specific things because last time i did that the video was taken down

Dates his own account of the grievance he later pleads to 2022-05-13. The complaint in C048 (Tufano v. Saladino et al, M.D. Pa., filed 2025-02-12) is recited by the court as alleging that the defendant "copied and used his diet and nutrition research and ideas without credit on social media" — which is this grievance, stated here 1,006 days before that case was filed (2022-05-13 → 2025-02-12, computed in code). It also records that a prior video was taken down after he named someone, which is his stated reason for not naming anyone here — so the absence of a name in this file is a documented editorial choice, not an absence of a target. ⚠ No filing, threatened or made, appears anywhere in this passage; he describes a grievance and a platform removal, not litigation. Possible case/dispute link: DSP003 and, prospectively, C048 / C055 / C059 (tentative, unconfirmed — identified by nickname and grievance, never by name or docket; see the rat boy note below).

Transcript-verified verbatim quote

Source removed. Quoted at 00:32 in the archived transcript.

Legal-system allegation
Moderate pattern relevanceJudicial or forum bias alleged05:20

Frankie's Free Range Meat Vlog - Product Restocks and Updates · October 25, 2022

landlord is still trying to evict us in court and everyone including my own lawyer seems to be on the side of the jerk off secret society members and you know the continued censorship of my YouTube channel

Three separate things in one sentence, and only one of them is a filing-restriction factor. (1) An eviction proceeding against him is live on 2022-10-25 — direction trap 1 applies squarely: the landlord is the moving party, so this is not a filing by him and cannot support any filing factor. (2) He alleges that the participants in that proceeding, including his own retained lawyer, are aligned with "secret society members" against him. That is an allegation that the forum is not honestly disposed toward him, which is what Judicial or forum bias alleged covers; it is a research classification of what he said, never a finding about any court, lawyer or organisation. (3) The YouTube-censorship grievance is restated. The tier is Moderate rather than Strong because no factor here is a core factor, no case is named, and the eviction matter resolves to no row in any of the 23 CSVs. Possible case/dispute link: Not found in aliases.csv, lawsuits.csv (case_title or defendants), disputes.csv, research_notes.csv or litigation_timeline.csv — the strings landlord and evict return zero across all 23 CSVs, so the eviction proceeding is unresolved, not untracked. No landlord, court or docket is named on camera either. Separately, the "secret society" framing later becomes a pleaded theory in several tracked actions (C038, C048, C059, C035/C063/C066, and aliases.csv carries Beverly Hills Masonic Lodge D0043 and Free and Accepted Masons of Union Lodge No 291 D0108), but he names nobody here, so direction trap 5 applies and no party link is licensed.

Transcript-verified verbatim quote

Source removed. Quoted at 05:20 in the archived transcript.

Dispute background statement
Moderate pattern relevance01:42

Health and Nutrition Q&A November 2022 · November 9, 2022

people started copying me plagiarizing my ideas and all that type of stuff and kind of twisting my information to sell their own stuff that's where I started looking at it and getting more irritated and just overall disappointed in in how everything else was going but hopefully I can continue to change that over the next few years the real thing that kind of makes me upset is that I'm really no longer able to just say everything I know and just give it out there because of what's happened so you know less people are able to improve their health because when I do that then someone just copies it and they censor me and they get all the credit for it

This is the grievance later pleaded in DSP003 — plagiarism of his diet research, by someone who then profits from it and gets the credit — articulated on camera on 2022-11-09, 826 days before C048 (Tufano v. Saladino et al, M.D. Pa., filed 2025-02-12), 993 days before C055 and 1,073 days before C059, all intervals computed in code. research_notes.csv records that those three near-identical complaints allege Paul Saladino "plagiarized his Carnivore Diet research without attribution and profited from it". The grievance shape matches exactly. What the transcript does not do is name anybody: he says "people", "someone", "influencers trying to make a profit". ⚠ Direction trap 5 (right grievance, possibly wrong party) is live here — a matching grievance licenses no party link, and this quote supports none. It also describes no filing, no threat to file, no court, and no adverse decision; it is a statement of motive, dated. Possible case/dispute link: DSP003 (C048 / C055 / C059) on grievance shape only — tentative and unconfirmed, with no party named in the transcript. ⚠ Note also the direction of the earlier proceeding the same dispute concerns: research_notes.csv records Saladino v. Tufano, No. 7:20-cv-9346 (S.D.N.Y., 2020) — a case brought against him, already two years old when this was recorded. Nothing in this transcript refers to it.

Transcript-verified verbatim quote

Source removed. Quoted at 01:42 in the archived transcript.

Related video research

Each video has its own research page with its verified publish date, timestamped statements and case links. A researched link between a video and a docket record is not a finding of causation in either direction.

Cite this page
Frank Tufano Litigation Research. "Tufano v. Saladino, MD et al (4:25-cv-01960)". Research last verified September 23, 2026. https://suedbyfranktufano.com/cases/4-25-cv-01960-tufano-v-saladino-md-et-al/