Lemuel Plummer says King Bach, Amanda Cerny and DeStorm Power walked away from their arbitration against him with $1 each in personal damages, and he wants everyone to know there was “no personal payday” for his former partners. Nobody said there was.
The Zeus Network CEO responded to reports on the arbitration award with a six slide statement posted jointly to his Instagram and the Zeus Network page. He called the public narrative “inaccurate and misleading” and wrote that the nearly $60 million in alleged misappropriation asserted against him “did not prevail.” He added that the arbitration did not establish theft, fraud or money laundering, that Zeus’ business expenses were recognized as legitimate, and that the legal and arbitration fees he had to pay are “simply part of the cost of doing business.”
The reporting never claimed the cofounders were getting rich off the award. The petition King Bach, Cerny and Power filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Sept. 29 asks a judge to confirm an award directing $9,826,837 back into Zeus itself. Their main claims were filed on the company’s behalf, which means any money recovered goes to the business, not into the pockets of the people who brought the case. Baller Alert reported exactly that. The award attached to the petition also shows the $1 figure is not what Plummer described. The panel did not give each cofounder $1. It gave the three of them, jointly, three separate $1 nominal damages awards: one for his failure to give them reasonable access to Zeus’ books and records, one for his failure to provide all of the quarterly financial statements and one for his failure to file Zeus’ tax returns. Nominal damages are a symbolic dollar awarded when a panel finds someone broke an agreement but the harm cannot be measured in money, and the panel found Plummer acted in bad faith on all three. Each one came with an order to open the books, send the quarterly statements and file the taxes, and Plummer is personally on the hook for any IRS fines or penalties. The award puts what he owes the cofounders directly at $1,740,003, which includes $1.74 million for their attorneys’ fees.
Plummer also wrote that “they did not win this case.” The panel ruled all three are members of Zeus, ordered him to pay the company back, ordered him to open the books and resume their distributions, and denied his $10.9 million counterclaim over DeStorm Power’s 2025 video. Three arbitrators found he paid himself $1,436,000 above the salary he told his partners he would take, and they called the $625,000 he sent to COGIC Israel, a church led by his father, a misappropriation of company funds. He was ordered to repay $3,467,000 in payment app transfers that had almost no paperwork and $1,974,167 in cash withdrawals that were never backed by records. On top of the $9.8 million owed to Zeus, he must personally pay the cofounders $1.74 million for their attorneys’ fees, cover 75% of the arbitration costs, reimburse Zeus for the lawyers it paid to defend him, and pay interest of 8.25% a year dating back to October 2022. The petition puts the total at $13,779,781.25.
The “cost of doing business” line leaves out why most of that bill landed on him. The panel cited Plummer’s bad faith on several claims and repeated failures to turn over financial records, including documentation for 2,857 transactions Zeus agreed to produce and only delivered for 525.
Part of his statement does hold up. The cofounders accused him of misappropriating about $56 million, and the panel awarded roughly $9.8 million. Arbitrators approved more than $10 million paid to a travel company, $2.75 million in private jets and $664,000 in 2024 Super Bowl tickets as legitimate business expenses. They called Zeus’ recordkeeping “woefully deficient” but found not enough evidence of actual theft for the rest of the disputed spending. The panel also did not award the roughly $3.6 million in back distributions the cofounders asked for, about $1.2 million each, and instead ordered Plummer to resume distributions going forward.
Lemuel Plummer also wrote that he disputed the three being members of Zeus because he did not believe they fulfilled their duties, and that the arbitrators recognized them as minority members “simply because they signed the operating agreement” in 2018. The panel went further than that. In sworn answers in 2024, Plummer said the three “were never members.” The arbitrators rejected that, pointing to years of him publicly calling them cofounders and partners, a 2021 Breakfast Club appearance where he said they held equity, and the K1 tax forms Zeus sent them as members. They described his testimony on the issue as “at best, confusing and inconsistent; at worst, it was simply not credible.” The panel also ruled the cofounders were never required to promote Zeus in the first place.
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In his final slide, Plummer wrote that he founded and built Zeus from the ground up and personally invested millions of his own money. According to the award, Plummer approached DeStorm Power with the idea in 2017, Power brought in King Bach, and King Bach brought in Cerny. Power testified he served as president of Zeus without pay, edited content for free during the 2018 launch and sold his house, before he was removed without notice and replaced by Jason Tolbert. On the money, Plummer claimed his company L Plummer Media loaned Zeus $905,504, but no loan documents were ever produced, and the panel ordered him to pay back $547,515 that Zeus had paid out as loan repayments.
He also wrote that the cofounders “moved on to other things” while he stayed with Zeus. The award describes them being shut out. Their side made more than 20 requests for financial records and was told the information was proprietary, bank statements they asked for years earlier were not turned over until early 2025, and Plummer stopped their tax distributions after 2021, which the panel found reflected a retaliatory motive.
Plummer called the revenue, subscriber and ownership numbers circulating about Zeus “inaccurate and false,” noting the company has never publicly reported what it makes or how many subscribers it has. That much is true. Zeus is privately held, it has no obligation to disclose its finances, and tax returns are not public. The panel also found Zeus has not filed tax returns for several years, rejected Plummer’s excuse that they could not be prepared until membership was settled, and made him personally responsible for any IRS penalties. That leaves the arbitration award, which became public when the cofounders filed it in court, as one of the few places those figures appear at all. It states Zeus has more than 2 million subscribers and brought in $115,297,700 in gross revenue in 2024. The operating agreement cited in the case lists Plummer’s stake at 42.67% and gives King Bach, Cerny and Power 16% each. His statement does not say which of those numbers he believes are wrong.
He closed by comparing Zeus to Netflix, Disney and Google, writing that major companies face lawsuits and shareholder disputes all the time, and that “business continues as usual.” The petition to confirm the award is pending before Judge Rupert A. Byrdsong at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Los Angeles. Under California law, the judge can confirm, correct or vacate the award, and Plummer has the right to oppose it. If it is confirmed, the cofounders can enforce it like any other court judgment.
