Lemuel Plummer Ordered to Repay Zeus $9.8 Million

Culture

Lemuel Plummer runs Zeus Network. A panel of three arbitrators says he has to give the company $9,826,837 back.

The ruling stayed private for months. It went public on September 29, when Zeus cofounders King Bach, Amanda Cerny and DeStorm Power filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court asking a judge to confirm the arbitration award and turn it into an enforceable court judgment. The award itself was issued on April 24, 2026, after nine days of hearings in July and August 2025 before arbitrators William D. Johnston, Stephen J. Kane and Glenn J. Waldman. The case is now pending before Judge Rupert A. Byrdsong at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, and as of this week's reporting Plummer has not yet filed a response.

The money with no paperwork

The panel's findings read like an audit nobody was supposed to see. Zeus sent about $3.6 million to third parties through PayPal, Cash App, Venmo, Apple Cash and Zelle. Plummer's own expert could find paperwork for $131,666 of it. The panel ordered him to repay the rest — $3,467,000, the largest single item in the award. Cash moved the same way. Zeus withdrew $1,997,867 in cash, records backed $23,700 of it, and Plummer has to repay the remaining $1,974,167. According to the panel, Zeus had one checking account and one debit card, and Plummer was the only person authorized to use either.

His pay was its own problem. At the start, Plummer told his partners his salary should run between $200,000 and $300,000 a year, and nobody objected. The panel found he paid himself $1,436,000 above that without the discussion the operating agreement required. He was ordered to return $770,222 that Zeus paid to L Plummer Media, a company he owns, plus $1,006,933 in reimbursements Zeus paid him directly. He also claimed L Plummer Media had loaned Zeus $905,504. No loan documents were ever produced, and the panel ordered him to repay $547,515 in what were called loan repayments.

Then there is the church. Plummer directed $625,000 of Zeus money to COGIC Israel, a church led by his father. Jason Tolbert, who later became president of Zeus, supported the payments but testified they had no business purpose. The panel called them a misappropriation of company funds.

The fight over whether they were ever owners

Before any of the money could be decided, the panel had to settle a more basic question: whether Bach, Cerny and Power owned anything at all. In sworn answers in January 2024, Plummer stated the three “were never members” of Zeus because they never paid their capital contributions. The panel pointed to the K-1 tax forms Zeus sent them as members from 2018 through 2021, a 2021 Breakfast Club appearance where Plummer said they held equity, and years of him calling them cofounders in public, down to an Instagram birthday post. It described his testimony as “at best, confusing and inconsistent; at worst, it was simply not credible,” and ruled in December 2025 that all three were and still are members. The operating agreement lists Plummer at 42.67% and each of the three at 16%. Most of Zeus belongs to other people.

Watch: a breakdown of the arbitration ruling and what Plummer was ordered to repay.

Locked out of their own company

The award describes partners who were shut out of a company they part-owned. Their side made more than 20 requests for financial records and was told the information was proprietary. During the arbitration, Zeus agreed to document 2,857 specific transactions and produced paperwork for 525. The panel found Zeus has not filed tax returns for several years. Plummer's explanation was that the returns could not be prepared until the arbitration decided who the members were. The panel called that excuse “without merit” and made him personally responsible for any IRS fines, penalties or interest. It also found he stopped sending the cofounders their tax distributions after 2021, ruled the cutoff retaliatory, and ordered the payments resumed. For the bad-faith findings — the blocked books, the missing quarterly statements, the unfiled returns — the panel gave the three cofounders, jointly, three awards of $1 each. Nominal damages. A dollar, three times, as a statement.

What Plummer did not lose

Plummer did not lose everything in that room. The cofounders accused him of misappropriating about $56 million, and the panel awarded roughly a sixth of it. More than $10 million paid to a travel company, nearly $3 million in ground transportation, $2.75 million in private jets, $1.76 million in security and $664,000 in tickets to the 2024 Super Bowl were all approved as legitimate business expenses. The panel called Zeus's recordkeeping “woefully deficient” and still said the evidence did not establish theft on the rest.

His counterclaim failed on one thing: proof

Plummer sought $10,900,904 from the cofounders, arguing that DeStorm Power's March 2025 video, “Truth About Zeus Networks,” defamed him and drove subscribers away. The panel found Power made the video after Plummer posted that Cerny was a fraud and that he had founded Zeus alone. It never decided whether the video was defamatory. It denied the claim because Plummer never proved the video caused the losses he claimed. What the award does record is Power's account of his own ending at Zeus: president without pay, editing content for free during the 2018 launch, a house sold and near bankruptcy behind him — then removed as president without notice and replaced by Tolbert, who has called Plummer family.

The numbers explain why four people fought this hard over a streaming service much of the industry once treated as a curiosity. According to the award, Zeus now has more than 2 million subscribers, and its net revenue grew from $322,894 in 2018 to $8,363,455 in 2024, with gross revenue of $115,297,700 that year. Plummer disputes the revenue and subscriber figures circulating publicly, and Zeus, privately held, has never released audited financials. Either way, the stakes in the petition are fixed: add the $1.74 million in legal fees the panel ordered Plummer to pay the cofounders personally — about 75% of the $2,320,123.71 they spent — plus 8.25% interest on the damages running back to October 2022, and the petition puts the total at $13,779,781.25. He must also reimburse Zeus for the lawyers the company paid to defend him and cover 75% of the arbitration costs.

Plummer's answer

Plummer responded this week with a six-slide statement posted to his Instagram and the Zeus Network page. He called the public narrative “inaccurate and misleading,” said the nearly $60 million in misappropriation claims asserted against him “did not prevail,” and noted the arbitration established no theft, no fraud and no money laundering. He pointed out that the three received $1 each and no personal damages beyond the fees, said he respects the arbitrators' decision recognizing them as members because they signed the 2018 operating agreement, called Zeus “exceptionally successful” and said the matter is behind him. Business, he said, continues as usual.

On that much, the calendar agrees with him. Baddies USA Chapter Three — the franchise's tenth season, billed as the Diamond Season — premiered on Zeus on Sunday, November 8, while the founder fight was making its way into court filings and blog posts. The slate is rolling. The petition sits in a downtown Los Angeles courthouse, where Judge Byrdsong can confirm the award, correct it, vacate it or dismiss the petition outright. If it is confirmed, Bach, Cerny and Power can enforce it like any other judgment. Plummer has the right to oppose it. He has not yet.