Published in The State Newspaper: May 13, 2026

At the last family dinner before her passing, Valerie Fulton remembers her late grandmother getting up from a table full of people and saying, “I don’t want to miss Jeopardy.” That’s the role the long-time game show played in her life, and so it was nothing less than wonderful for granddaughter Valerie to earn the opportunity to appear on the legendary quiz show.

A Greenville attorney, Fulton said she and her boyfriend were watching the show one night when he suggested she take the test to qualify. “It happened very quickly,” she said. The next thing she knew, Valerie and a cousin were on their way to Los Angeles for filming. It was the first time she’d on a quiz show since she participating in the quiz bowl at Greenville Middle School.

“Jeopardy has been a family ritual forever,” she said. “So being able to qualify and appear on the program was a dream come true.”

The show films 10 shows over two days. When they’re not competing, contestants are in the green room without their phones. “There was a lot of camaraderie,” she said. She feared she’d be the odd one out amid a bunch of smart people but found instead that her knack for trivia and trained legal mind kept her very much in the mix. Her opponents were the reigning champion and a professor of tree fruit physiology at Michigan State University. The program hasn’t aired yet, so neither the network nor the participants was permitted to share the results.

Valerie is a partner at Fulton and Barr, a Greenville-based personal injury law firm started by her late mother, Johnnie Sue Fulton, and co-founding partner Andrew Barr. A graduate of Wofford College and Washington and Lee Law School, Valerie has worked for the firm since 2019. Fulton said she wore a pin of hers on the show that is shaped like a lizard. “It was a gift from my dad that she thought she’d lost, so she secretly bought another one,” Fulton said. “One night, she asked him to put it back into her jewelry box where he immediately saw the other, “lost” pin. He asked her if they’d started reproducing.”

Fulton said her Jeopardy jaunt was the first time she had been to California. “The weather was great. The Mexican food was great,” she said. Wonderful is a word that keeps coming up when she talks about the experience. Not so wonderful was the buzzer. “It’s much harder than you might think,” she said with a laugh.

To learn more about Valerie’s Jeopardy experience, and to put one of the Upstate’s premier legal minds to work for you, call us today.

Full article: https://www.thestate.com/news/state/south-carolina/article315729530.html