Eighth Middle District action added: Tufano v. Harding (September 17, 2026)
A federal action filed in the Middle District of Pennsylvania on September 17, 2026 -- Tufano v. Harding et al, 3:26-cv-02715 -- was added to the tracker as C108 on the day it was filed. It names seven defendants: Erik Harding, Lance Baker, Kareem Shami, Atrakt, Based Bodyworks, Bytedance Ltd and TikTok Inc. The docket codes it as nature of suit 320, assault, libel and slander, on a diversity cause under 28 U.S.C. 1332, and assigns it to Magistrate Judge Phillip J. Caraballo, who already appears on five cases in this dataset.
Four of the seven defendants were already tracked. Kareem Shami was named in C079, filed seven weeks earlier and still pending, which carries the identical nature-of-suit and cause coding; Based Bodyworks and TikTok were named in the actions removed to federal court as C065. Because both cases now sit at two originating actions apiece, Kareem Shami and Based Bodyworks each gain a party page that did not exist before this filing. A new dispute group records the pairing with C079, which until now belonged to no group.
The complaint was not read and no claims summary is published for this case. It is held on PACER and is absent from the free RECAP archive, which holds the docket header for this case and nothing else -- no documents and no entry list. What is recorded is therefore the court's own docket coding and the party list, and nothing about what the action alleges. For the same reason the case is recorded as an unclear rather than a confirmed repeat filing: the parties and the docket coding overlap with two pending cases, but with no readable pleading on either side there is no claim set to compare, and the published coding rule requires the unclear code over a guess.
One name in the caption was deliberately not merged into an existing party. The defendant appears as Bytedance Ltd, while every earlier case in this dataset names ByteDance Inc; the two are different legal entities and nothing on this record establishes they are the same party, so Bytedance Ltd is recorded separately. Atrakt is likewise recorded as its own party rather than folded into Ascend Labs Enterprises LLC, the company named in C079 that the research archive describes as selling under that brand -- the brand relationship is recorded in the archive, but no document has been read that establishes the corporate one.
The sweep that confirmed this case is new returned nothing else. A nationwide search of the free federal docket archive, with no court filter, for anything filed since September 1, 2026 returned four dockets. Three were already held: the Eastern District of New York action recorded as C105, the Carbondale action recorded as C106, and a Third Circuit appeal docketed September 9 that was already recorded as an appellate row against C064. Only 3:26-cv-02715 was absent.
Two videos published on September 11, six days before the filing, were linked to the case. Both were already in the video record from an earlier pass and neither is changed here. The link records the dated adjacency between publication and filing at medium confidence; neither transcript names any defendant or any case, and the identification rests on each video's title and location tag, which are metadata set by the uploader rather than statements by the speaker.
Related cases
Note
This entry records a newly filed lawsuit, not an outcome. Nothing in this case has been decided, no defendant has responded, and the allegations behind it have not been published here because the complaint is not publicly obtainable. Naming a case as possibly repeating an earlier one is a research classification made under a published rule, never a court's finding and never a determination that anyone is a vexatious litigant; here that classification is expressly left unresolved. The two linked videos are public statements by a party, and the link between them and this filing is a chronological observation about publication dates, not evidence that either video is about this case.