Jared Kleinstein spent months hearing the same response every time he called LIV Golf’s finance team about money owed to his company. It sounded like regret. Nothing behind it ever moved.
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Kleinstein runs Fresh Tape Media, the production company that handled LIV Golf’s 2025 and 2026 preseason media days. He is now suing the league for more than $1.2 million in unpaid invoices, and the sentence he kept hearing turned out to explain almost everything that followed. Speaking on the Trey Wingo Show, Kleinstein said he began escalating in the spring. He called LIV’s finance contacts directly and asked for a timeline. Leadership’s response stayed the same every time.
“Nothing else from leadership other than like a lot a lot of we’re trying here and our hands are tied,” Kleinstein said.
At the center of the suit is LIV Golf Week 2026, the league’s preseason event held in West Palm Beach, Florida, from January 12-14. Fresh Tape ran the show’s logistics and production, working with a field of more than 50 players spanning all 13 LIV teams, shooting promotional material for the league and lining up interviews with outside media on-site.
According to the company, it handed over more than 50,000 photos and videos to LIV once the event wrapped, and a chunk of that footage is reportedly still circulating across the league’s social, broadcast, and digital channels today. And while LIV did put a formal settlement offer on the table, it was well short of what the company was owed.
LIV proposed $200,000 in May to close out Fresh Tape’s invoices from LIV Golf Week 2026 in West Palm Beach. A month later, the number moved again, in the wrong direction.
“They offered us 200,000 for the total. They came back and said, ‘Sorry, remember the 200,000? It’s actually now 150.’ So, they reduced it,” Kleinstein said.
Kleinstein did not need a lawyer to tell him the second offer was meant to end the conversation. Friends still working inside LIV confirmed as much. Texts confirming the $150,000 figure arrived before any formal reply went out.
“We were just a small part of this, right? Like we were just a tiny little component to this,” he added.
One LIV staffer, a friend of Kleinstein’s still working at the league, told him how many other vendors were stuck in that same unpaid queue. Nobody at LIV denied the debt or raised their voice on any call, including the ones about the settlement offer. The money still didn’t move.
Adding to LIV’s headaches, Mobii Systems Group Limited, a Canadian firm that used to handle broadcast tech for the league, filed its own suit last month, seeking upwards of $1.1 million over unpaid invoices, breach of contract, and accrued interest.
The vendor queue broke along a clear line. Vendors tied to weekly tournament operations kept getting paid because live events could not run without them. Fresh Tape’s invoices, tied to a one-time media days production, fell outside of that priority list.
Fresh Tape filed suit on July 21. LIV CEO Scott O’Neil has since said publicly that the league intends to “do right by” its vendors. Kleinstein called the comment sincere.
He has said he would still work on a hypothetical LIV 2.0 project, but only under upfront payment terms common in other industries. But the $150,000 offer, still on the table against a $1.2 million invoice, stands as the clearest signal so far of how the league plans to settle what it owes before any next iteration of LIV Golf begins.