One America News Network filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against Rachel Maddow and MSNBC in California’s southern district Monday.
The complaint alleges that the dispute began a week after OAN president Charles Herring “called out and objected to Comcast’s anti-competitive censorship in an email to Comcast’s President of Content Acquisition,” according to a press release from the network. It then alleges that shortly after that Maddow opened her show by saying OAN “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”
While it’s not entirely clear exactly what segment OAN is taking exception with, they allege that Maddow and MSNBC “knew this statement was false and that they acted maliciously and recklessly in making it,” adding that it was “meant to damage OAN’s business and reputation.”
Back in July, Maddow pushed a story published by the Daily Beast that alleged Kristian Rouz, an OAN political reporter, has simultaneously been writing for Sputnik, a Kremlin-owned news outlet that helped Russia interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
“The actual news that this super right-wing news outlet that the president has repeatedly endorsed as a preferable alternative to Fox News, because he thinks Fox is insufficiently pro-Trump, so now he like this is other outlet better,” Maddow said on July 22, adding that OAN “shares staff with the Kremlin. What? It’s an easy thing to throw out like an epitaph in the Trump era; ‘Hey that looks like Russian propaganda.'”
She went on to say the most “right-wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda. Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government.”
OAN is represented by Skip Miller, a partner at Miller Barondess, LLP, and he said in regards to the lawsuit, “One America is wholly owned, operated and financed by the Herring family in San Diego. They are as American as apple pie. They are not paid by Russia and have nothing to do with the Russian government. This is a false and malicious libel, and they’re going to answer for it in a court of law.”
Neither MSNBC or Miller responded to immediate requests for comment.
