CNN has settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit brought by Nick Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School student who members of the press falsely accused in January 2019 of harassing and abusing an elderly Native American protester in Washington, D.C.
It looks like I stand corrected. The Covington teenager may actually negotiate favorable results from the multiple defamation lawsuits he filed against the news organizations that slandered him.
CNN is the first to settle one of the $250 million lawsuits filed by Sandmann’s attorneys. The teenager himself confirmed the news Tuesday with a brief tweet that read, “Yes, We settled with CNN.” The amount of the settlement has not yet been disclosed.
Good for him. I hope his concurrent defamation cases against NBC News and the Washington Post end on a similarly happy note.
Early last year, CNN and others “reported” that a group of students from Covington, Kentucky, including Sandmann, who endured the brunt of negative news coverage and commentary, hurled racial slurs and taunts at protester Nathan Phillips. The Covington teenagers did no such thing, as publicly available videos made clear. In fact, footage of the incident shows the teens were accosted not only by Phillips, who clearly sought out a confrontation, but that they were also harassed by members of the racist, anti-Semitic Black Hebrew Israelite cult. Yet, the Covington teenagers were the ones who the news media went after.
Following the discovery of evidence showing the nation’s leading news organizations got the story horribly, irrevocably wrong, Sandmann teamed up with attorneys, including Lin Wood of Richard Jewell fame, to punch back at the organizations that did not so much as hesitate to accuse him and the other Kentucky teenagers of violent bigotry.
CNN being the first of the newsrooms to end on terms favorable to Sandmann is likely just fine by the teenager and his attorney.
“CNN was probably more vicious in its direct attacks on Nicholas than the Washington Post. And CNN goes into millions of individuals’ homes,” Wood said at the time the suit was first brought against the cable news network.
The lawsuit sought damages for the “emotional distress” Sandmann and his family suffered as a result of CNN’s coverage.
“They really went after Nicholas with the idea that he was part of a mob that was attacking the Black Hebrew Israelites, yelling racist slurs at the Black Hebrew Israelites. Totally false,” Wood said.
He added, “Now you say you’ve seen the tape; if you took the time to look at the full context of what happened that day, Nicholas Sandmann did absolutely nothing wrong. He was, as I’ve said to others, he was the only adult in the room. But you have a situation where CNN couldn’t resist the idea that here’s a guy with a young boy, that Make America Great Again cap on. So, they go after him.”
Wood also announced this week that they intend to sue Gannett within 60 days.
As for standing corrected, I wrote in November of Sandmann’s lawsuits:
…
If I were a betting man, I would bet against Sandmann’s chances of winning against NBC, the Washington Post, and others. It is too much of an uphill battle to prove a newsroom’s intent to defame.
It is still true that it is notoriously difficult in America to win a defamation lawsuit against a news organization. There is always the alternative of settling, but I thought even that option was unrealistic for Sandmann. CNN, which decided this week that it is preferable to settle rather than go to trial and go through the process of — gulp! — discovery (oh, to read those internal CNN communications!), showed this week that I was wrong.
If NBC and the Washington Post come to the same conclusion as the “Facts First” cable network, I suppose I will have to eat crow soon.
