North Carolina’s Republican candidate for Governor, Mark Robinson, sued CNN on Tuesday over a recent report which he described as defamatory.
According to the report, which first aired September 19, CNN alleged that Robinson made some explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board over a decade ago.
The report disclosed that in a part of the post, the Republican governorship candidate referred to himself as a “black NAZI,” stating that he enjoyed transgender pornography and that he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama.
The report adds that Robinson, in another part of the post, described Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “worse than a maggot.”
However, Robinson’s lawsuit, filed in Wake County Superior Court, denied all the allegations by the CNN report while seeking $50 million compensation in damages.
Announcing the lawsuit with a Virginia-based attorney at a news conference in Raleigh, Robinson denied authoring the messages, stating that the report was part of efforts to promote what “appears to be a coordinated attack aimed at derailing his campaign for governor.”
He described himself as a candidate who has been targeted from Day 1 by folks who disagree with him politically and want to see him get destroyed, as he alleged that the report was a product of high-tech lynching.
Although CNN has refused to make any further statements on the issue, the report claimed that it matched details of the account on the pornography website’s message board to other online accounts held by Robinson.
The media house said that it compared usernames, a known email address, and Robinson’s full name and that the results matched his age, length of marriage, and other biographical information. It added that it also compared figures of speech that came up frequently in his public Twitter profile and appeared in discussions by the account on the pornographic website and that all comparisons proved that he was responsible for the post.
However, the Republican candidate, who would be the first-ever Black governor of North Carolina if elected, claimed that multiple data breaches had previously compromised his data, including his name, date of birth, passwords, and the email address supposedly associated with the NudeAfrica account.
His lawsuit also sued a Greensboro punk rock band singer who once worked at the porn shop and Louis Love Money.
According to the lawsuit, the singer alleged in a music video and in an interview with a media outlet that Robinson, in the 1990s and early 2000s, frequented the porn shop where he worked to purchase pornographic videos, while Louis Love Money is said to have released the video and spoke with other media outlets before the CNN report. In his most recent phone interview with journalists, Money insisted that the music video’s content was truthful.
“My story hasn’t changed,” he said.
However, Robinson denied the allegation, saying, “Lt. Gov. Robinson was not spending hours at the video store, five nights a week. He was not renting or previewing videos, and he did not purchase ‘bootleg’ or other videos from Defendant Money.”
The CNN report has cost Robinson a handful of supporters, including presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has distanced himself from Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign in the last four weeks since the report first aired.
In the same vein, the Republican Governors Association, which had already spent millions of dollars on Robinson’s gubernatorial bid, has also reportedly stopped advertising the governorship candidate.
Robinson’s lawyer, Jesse Binnall, addressed journalists Tuesday. He decried efforts by unidentified entities to render his firm’s efforts useless in defence of Robinson as they have been denied access to certain vital information but said he expects to find more “bad actors.”
Binnall, whose clients have included Trump and his campaign, said his firm will use every tool at its disposal now that a lawsuit has been filed, including the subpoena power, to continue pursuing the facts.
