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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sent the case of a social media influencer convicted in a murder-for-hire plot back to a lower court for review—though Justice Samuel Alito dissented, arguing the move was unnecessary.
Ashley Grayson was convicted and sentenced in 2024 to 10 years in prison for attempting to hire a couple to murder a rival influencer in relation to negative online reviews about her online courses on how to make money.
Dallas-based Grayson, who once claimed she made $1 million in an hour, was recorded on a FaceTime call with aspiring influencer Olivia Johnson, who was heard request an advance payment for a killing Grayson allegedly asked her to carry out, prosecutors said.
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Yet the FaceTime should not have been used against her, Grayson argued, and the government agreed. Under the Federal Wiretap Act, is illegal to deliberately intercept electronic communications and use such evidence in court.
In a brief, unsigned order on Monday, the Supreme Court vacated the Sixth Circuit’s ruling upholding Grayson’s conviction and sent the case back for “further consideration in light of the position asserted by the Solicitor General in his brief.”
Alito argued in a brief dissent that even if the FaceTime call was included in error, it did not affect the outcome of the case.
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“The United States now concedes that the Sixth Circuit erred in applying a clean-hands exception. Nonetheless, the Government argues that any error was harmless. I agree,” he wrote.
“Even setting aside the FaceTime recording, a mountain of properly admitted evidence proved” Grayson’s guilt, he added.
“Most prominently, the evidence included a recording of a separate call petitioner made to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in which she described the contents of the challenged FaceTime call in detail and acknowledged that she had offered to pay for murder. Because the FaceTime recording was cumulative of other overwhelming evidence of guilt, I would deny the petition.”
Newsweek contacted attorneys for Grayson via an email sent outside regular business hours on Tuesday.
Murder Plot Targeted Ex-Boyfriend, Negative Reviewers
Grayson, a Dallas-based social media influencer, who described herself on her Instagram account as a bestseller, eight-figure business coach, course creator and philanthropist, according to Fox News.
In August 2022, she invited an Memphis-based influencer she had worked with in the past to fly to Dallas to discuss a "business opportunity," the U.S Attorney’s office for the Western District of Tennessee said in a press release after Grayson was convicted. Court documents identified the woman as Olivia Johnson.
Johnson and her husband flew to Dallas the following month and met with Grayson and her husband, Joshua Grayson.
Prosecutors said that during the meeting, Grayson offered to pay the couple to kill a woman from Southaven, Mississippi, who ran a similar business to Grayson. Although they never met in person, Grayson suspected the woman of creating fake online profiles that criticized her and her company, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in the release.
Grayson also asked the couple to kill her ex-boyfriend and a Texas woman who had recently made negative social media posts about her. Grayson offered at least at $20,000 for each killing, according to prosecutors.
On September 10, Johnson video-recorded a call to Grayson in which Grayson confirmed she wanted the Southaven woman killed as "soon as possible" and offered an additional $5,000 for the murder to be completed within the following week.
Later, Johnson and her husband sent Grayson a picture of police lights from an unrelated incident, pretending that they attempted to carry out the murder but were unsuccessful, prosecutors said. They demanded half of the initially promised fee—$10,000—from Grayson for the alleged attempt and then traveled to Dallas to collect it.
A grand jury in July 2023 returned a one-count indictment for Use of Interstate Facility in Commission of Murder-for-Hire against Ashley Grayson and her husband Joshua Grayson.
Her husband was acquitted.
Ashley Grayson’s Supreme Court Case
Grayson had sought to bar the FaceTime call recording from being used at trial, arguing that it violated the Federal Wiretap Act.
The law generally prohibits the interception of oral and wire communications and bars the use of unlawfully obtained recordings in court.
The trial judge allowed the recording under an exception known as a “clean hands” rule and the U.S. Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the decision, pointing to a 1995 decision in United States v. Murdock where the court held that unlawfully intercepted communications could be used in criminal trials as long as the government played no role in obtaining them.
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Grayson took the case to the Supreme Court, where she argued that there is no “clean hands” exception to the Federal Wiretap Act. The federal government agreed, but urged the justices to deny review or to send the case back to the lower court for another look.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said there was no need for the high court to intervene because of how rarely such issues arise.
“This case appears to be the first in 30 years in which either the court of appeals or any district court in that circuit has applied Murdock’s clean hands exception,” he wrote in a May filing.
He also argued that the outcome might ultimately be unchanged, including because it is unclear whether the recording was illegally obtained in the first place.
What Happens Next
The case now returns to the Sixth Circuit, which will reexamine whether the recording should have been admitted and whether it had any impact on Grayson’s conviction.
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