During a videotaped deposition before his death, Kyle admitted that parts of his story weren’t true. He also admitted that he tried to remove that story from the book after a friend warned him that if it wasn’t true Jesse could sue him, but he let his ghost writer and publisher talk him into keeping it.
Add to that all of the witnesses on his side admitted to drinking, some of them quite heavily, that night and that only one of them claimed to have seen the whole incident and it was an uphill battle for Kyle’s lawyer.
Why didn’t Ventura sue the publisher?
All Ventura had to prove was that Kyle lied and did so knowingly.
When there’s a videotaped admission directly from the man saying he did those things, it’s not too hard.
I love that people on this thread are saying Kyle’s lawyer must have been incompetent. I say he must have been a genius to be able to convince two out of ten jurors that the videotape was wrong.
Sounds like maybe the ghost writer and publisher WERE trying to gain from defaming Ventura, if what you’ve said is true. Which is really sad then, because the $500,000 for defamation is going to be paid by the publisher’s insurance company, but the $1.3 million for wrongful profit will be paid out of the widow’s profits, if I’m understanding correctly.
Stinks if both Ventura and the widow had to go through this crap because the publisher wanted to make money off what Kyle didn’t even want in the book. I’m not a Ventura fan in any way and suspect that most of what was claimed was probably true, but Ventura had no way to really win once the story was published. He’s still not going to be accepted by other SEALs even with this court win, because he put Kyle’s widow through all this. IMHO.