RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) 鈥 CNN wants a court to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed by North Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson that attacks its report that he made explicit posts on a pornography website鈥檚 message board. The network says Robinson presented no evidence that the network believed its story was false or aired it recklessly.
The September report says Robinson, this month, left statements over a decade ago on the message board in which, in part, he referred to himself as a 鈥渂lack NAZI" and said he enjoyed transgender pornography. The report also says he preferred Adolf Hitler to then-President Barack Obama and slammed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as 鈥渨orse than a maggot.鈥
Robinson, who was seeking to become the state's first Black governor, said he didn鈥檛 write those posts and sued in October, just before early in-person voting was to begin.
While filing a dismissal motion Thursday in Raleigh federal court, attorneys for CNN said Robinson鈥檚 arguments suggesting he was the likely victim of a computer hacking operation that created fake messages would require a series of events that is not just 鈥渋mplausible, it is ridiculous.鈥
Generally speaking, a public official claiming defamation must show a defendant knew a statement it made was false or did so with reckless disregard for the truth.
鈥淩obinson did not and cannot plausibly allege facts that show that CNN published the Article with actual malice,鈥 attorney Mark Nebrig wrote in a memo backing the dismissal motion, adding that the lawsuit 鈥渄oes not include a single allegation demonstrating that CNN doubted the veracity of its reporting.鈥
For Robinson, who already had a history of inflammatory comments about topics like abortion and , the CNN story nearly led to the collapse of his campaign. After the report's airing, most of his top campaign staff quit, advertising from the Republican Governors Association stopped and fellow Republicans distanced themselves from him,
Robinson lost to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein by nearly 15 points and will leave office at year-end.
Robinson's lawsuit was initially filed in state court. It says, in part, that CNN chose to run its report based on data from the website NudeAfrica, which had been hacked several years ago and ran on vulnerable, outdated software. His suit claims the network did nothing to verify the posts. He's seeking monetary damages.
Thursday's memo highlights the network's story, including a section where the CNN journalists showed how they connected Robinson to a username on the NudeAfrica site.
As the CNN story said previously, the memo says the network matched details of the account on the message board to other online accounts held by Robinson by comparing usernames, an email address and his full name. The details discussed by the account holder matched Robinson鈥檚 length of marriage, where he lived at the time, and that both Robinson and the account holder had mothers who worked at a historically Black university, the memo says. CNN also said it found matches of figures of speech used by both the NudeAfrica account holder and in Robinson鈥檚 social media posts.
鈥淭his is hardly a case where, as Robinson alleges, CNN 鈥榙isregarded or deliberately avoided the truth鈥 rather than investigate,鈥 Nebrig said, adding later that the network 鈥渉ad no reason to seriously doubt that Robinson was the author鈥 of the posts.
Robinson's attorneys didn't immediately respond to an email Friday seeking comment. The lawsuit says anyone could have used Robinson's breached data to create accounts on the internet.
His state lawsuit also sued Louis Love Money, a former porn shop worker who alleged in a music video and a media interview that for several years starting in the 1990s, Robinson frequented a porn shop where Money was working and that Robinson purchased porn videos from him. Robinson said that was untrue.
Money in the state lawsuit. But since then, CNN moved the lawsuit to federal court, saying that it's the proper venue for a North Carolina resident like Robinson and a Georgia-based company like CNN and that the claims against Money are unrelated.
