Posted on 10/18/2026 5:36:29 PM PDT by Libloather
CBS News is facing a defamation lawsuit as a Maryland teenager seeks $20 million in damages, claiming he was falsely identified as a person arrested for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s lining.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, identified the 15-year-old plaintiff simply as “JV.”
“He was not arrested for vandalizing it. He was not accused by law enforcement of vandalizing it. Yet CBS News broadcast and published a story to a national audience that placed JV’s image alongside the assertion that five people had been arrested for vandalizing and ‘sabotaging’ the Reflecting Pool, thereby falsely portraying JV as one of the perpetrators of a highly publicized federal crime,” the lawsuit stated.
“The accusation was particularly damaging because at all times material to the allegations, the Reflecting Pool renovation and subsequent alleged vandalism of the Reflecting Pool is or has been the subject of intense national attention and political controversy,” the complaint continued.
“President Donald Trump frequently discusses the Reflecting Pool renovation and publicly condemned those accused of vandalism in extraordinarily harsh terms, stating that they should be ‘prosecuted to the max,’” it added.
The lawsuit states that CBS “inserted” JV into the controversy and “exposed him to extreme embarrassment, humiliation, and the public condemnation” directed at the actual vandals.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Lazy media. Lazy investigative journalism
Awwwwww, so sorry.
Faucci appreciates that.
My guess is that they were so fixated at CBS that they just assumed the guy was guilty, and were doing all they could to exonerate him in the media in order to pin something else on Trump, that it never occurred to them the guy might be actually innocent.
I’ll take this opportunity to jump in and discuss, as I often do, the laziness and ignorance of media, left, right, and center, in discussing legal matters. I have never once seen any media explain that, in this case, the $20 million figure was pulled by his lawyers right out of the thin air. It does not necessarily have any relationship to the amount of recoverable damages the persons has sustained. I very much doubt this kid can prove debilitating damage to his reputation. I didn’t know anything about this until I read this story. Apologize. Run a retraction. $100 or $250K makes the case go away
it is lawsuits like this that created the situation where even when there is video of someone clearly committing a crime the press will only call them a person of interest.
I thought they misidentifying the teen as the wrong gender...
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