By Diana Novak Jones
(Reuters) – North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor Mark Robinson filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit against CNN on Tuesday, saying the network’s report that he called himself a “black Nazi” more than a decade ago on a pornography website and made other inflammatory comments was “recklessly false.”
The lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of Wake County, North Carolina, by Robinson, an African-American who is also the lieutenant governor in North Carolina, denied that he made the comments.
It called CNN’s September report a “malicious hit job” that was based on unverifiable data and was timed to derail his chances in the state’s Nov. 5 gubernatorial election, where he faces Democrat Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general.
A CNN spokesperson declined to comment. Attorneys for Robinson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Robinson called his lawsuit an effort to fight back against “one of the greatest examples of political interference in this state’s history.”
Robinson, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, is represented by Virginia attorney Jesse Binnall, who has represented Trump in prior cases.
The CNN report attributed a number of sexual, lewd and offensive posts on a pornography site to Robinson, who it claimed posted under the name “minisoldr.” In one 2010 post on the site, CNN reported that Robinson wrote, “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”
Reuters was unable to verify the posts, which CNN reported had been removed from the porn site.
Polls in September consistently showed Stein ahead of Robinson in the race.
In his lawsuit, Robinson, 56, said CNN published the article “despite harboring doubt over the veracity and verifiability of the supposedly supporting information and deliberately avoided the truth.”
Robinson said he was given the chance to respond to CNN’s claims but wasn’t able to examine the data, which he claims came from a data breach via the dark web, a portion of the internet that is not indexed by popular search engines.
(Reporting by Diana Jones; Editing by Leigh Jones and Deepa Babington)
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