North Carolina Republican sues CNN over report on pornography site posts

Oct 15 (Reuters) – North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit against CNN on Tuesday, saying he portrayed himself on a pornography website in a report on the network more than a decade ago Being called a “black Nazi” and making other inflammatory comments were “ruthlessly wrong.”

The lawsuit filed by Robinson, an African American and lieutenant governor in North Carolina, in the Wake County, North Carolina, Supreme Court denied that he made those comments.

CNN's September report called it a “malicious assassin” based on unverifiable data and designed to scuttle his chances in the state's Nov. 5 gubernatorial election, where he will face Democrat Josh Stein, the attorney general of the state.

A CNN spokesman declined to comment. Robinson's lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

At a news conference Tuesday, Robinson called his lawsuit an attempt to push back against “one of the greatest examples of political interference in the history of this state.”

Robinson, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, is represented by Jesse Binnall, a Virginia lawyer who has represented Trump in previous cases.

Reuters was unable to verify the posts, but CNN reported they had been removed from the porn site.

Polls in September showed Stein consistently ahead of Robinson in the race.

In his lawsuit, Robinson, 56, said CNN published the article “despite having doubts about the accuracy and verifiability of the supposed supporting information and deliberately avoiding the truth.”

Robinson said he had an opportunity to respond to CNN's claims but was unable to review the data. According to him, these came from a data breach on the Dark Web, a part of the Internet that is not indexed by common search engines.

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Contributor to the Daily Docket, Reuters' daily legal industry newsletter. Diana reports on litigation, mass torts, and the plaintiffs' bar. She previously worked at Law360 and the Chicago Sun-Times.