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By next Monday, the New York Times might be fighting a third major defamation claim.
Already facing legal action from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, the newspaper will likely find itself served with papers from Nicholas Sandmann, the high-school student the leftist media smeared as a racist after last year’s March for Life.
The news comes from Sandmann’s attorney, who filed a status report with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
They told the court that they’ll file more lawsuits against the Times, Gannett, ABC, CBS, and Rolling Stone before March 9, Fox19 in Covington reported.
Latest Action
The latest lawsuits stem from the media hit job on Sandmann when he stood his ground against a “Native American elder” and fake war hero at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18, 2019.
Sandmann and his high-school chums from Covington Catholic were awaiting buses to leave the march when a group of crackpots, the Black Hebrew Israelites, began shouting racial slurs and other insults. The boys replied with high-school chants. They said nothing untoward.
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But then Nathan Phillips, the reputed Indian wiseman and war hero, confronted Sandmann. The Indian, a left-wing activist and convicted criminal who never served in Vietnam as he claimed, banged a drum and chanted eerie gibberish in Sandman’s face. The Kentucky boy didn’t move and did nothing wrong.
But Sandman is white and wore a MAGA hat, so the media pounced. They smeared the innocent boy as a racist who deserved, as CNN’s Reza Aslan tweeted, to be punched in the face.
End result: Major lawsuits.
CNN settled with Sandmann last month; actions against NBC and the Washington Post are pending.
And now, Sandmann’s attorneys say, it’s time to file more, Fox 19 reported. Thus the status report:
All of the future defendants … have published or republished statements made by Nathan Phillips and others that Nicholas blocked or otherwise restricted Phillips’ free movement and would not allow Phillips to retreat at the National Mall on January 18, 2019. Nicholas reserves his right to file complaints in this Court or any other court against any other potential defendant not listed above, subject to the applicable statute of limitations.
Personalities in Trouble, Too
Aside from CNN, NBC, and the Post, Sandmann has sued a number of media personalities and politicians.
They include Aslan, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Democrat Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, CNN’s Ana Navarro, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, and hate-Trump comedienne Kathy Griffin.
Aslan, an angry immigrant whom CNN fired because he repeatedly called President Trump a “piece of sh*t,” tweeted this sentiment, which he deleted when he received notice of the lawsuit: “Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”
Others, the lawsuit says, used the following terms to describe Sandmann:
“Display of hate, disrespect and intolerance”; “heartbreaking”; “decency decayed”; “racist”; “cried for America”; “infamous”; “gall”; “shameful”; “darker chapters”; compared to genocide; “laughing and egging on”; “hurtful” behavior; “awful”; “cavemen gestures”; “taunting”; “harassing”; “stalking”; “mocking”; “bullies” who should be doxed, “named and shamed”, expelled from school, denied admission to college, be punched in the face, and their lives ruined.
Sandmann has two attorneys: Lin Wood, who sued multiple media outlets on behalf of Richard Jewell, who was falsely accused of the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta; and Robert Barnes, who defended Alex Jones in lawsuits filed after Jones’s comments about the Sandy Hook school shooting.
Other Lawsuits
As for the Times, Trump’s campaign accused the newspaper of defamation in a lawsuit filed last week.
The lawsuit alleges that a column by former Timesman Max Frankel defamed the campaign by accusing it of an “overarching deal [with Russia]: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions. The Trumpites knew about the quid and held out the prospect of the quo.”
Palin’s lawsuit charges defamation because the paper falsely connected her to the near-fatal shooting of then-Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).
Rolling Stone might be in the biggest trouble of all. It doesn’t need another lawsuit that demonstrates the bias or incompetence of its editors and writers.
It paid a fortune to the victims of its story about a rape at the University of Virginia that the Washington Post — also a Sandmann target — proved was false.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
