Free Republic

The online video platform and web-host company Rumble scored a victory on Friday when a federal judge held Rumble could proceed with discovery in its defamation lawsuit against Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, the co-founders of Check My Ads. [snip]....meaning the country may soon learn much more about how the censorship-industrial complex functions — including Democrats and Media Matters’ alleged role. In late November, Rumble filed a two-count complaint in a federal court in Florida against Jammi and Atkins and ten unnamed John Doe Defendants. According to the complaint, Jammi and Atkins are co-founders of Check My Ads, a 501(c)...

@LauraLoomer I should sue Bill Maher @billmaher for Defamation. This is beyond the pale and it’s a complete and blatant lie. I have never in my life seen such a coordinated attack by the mainstream Media, the White House and leftist personalities to target a private citizen and investigative journalist simply because I flew on a plane and I support Donald Trump. This is unacceptable. And it’s a full blown LIE and incredibly disrespectful to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. It’s very obvious some type of memo went out because the reaction to what I said is completely...

The two IRS agents who blew the whistle on the Hunter Biden tax investigation and significantly altered the course of the case, on Friday night sued the first son’s lawyer Abbe Lowell for defamation. The two whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, are suing for libel because of the alleged damage done to their careers, and are requesting a jury trial in Washington, D.C. The whistleblowers originally brought concerns to the House Ways and Means Committee that the Justice Department had provided preferential treatment to Biden during a probe into his alleged tax violations. Shapley and Ziegler alleged in Friday's...

There are plenty of good web browsers to use, and Firefox and its Waterfox spinoff, most of the time, are good. But I noticed something the other day about both of them. I was trying to log onto this Conservative shopping site called “Patriot Depot”, and when I would put the web address in, it would automatically re-direct to Google. This was true for both of them. I tried this with my other browsers, and the site came on just fine with them. Perhaps some lefty programmer at Firefox put a re-direct as a practical joke. If true, given that...

Defamation isn't always easy to prove in court. If it were, the New York Times and the Washington Post would be launching GoFundMe pages and holding bake sales to pay off their legal bills. Most prominent Republican candidates and politicians probably have at least a dozen legitimate defamation lawsuits against various mainstream media outlets that they'd file right away if they had a decent chance of winning. With publications like the Times and WaPo, the line between editorial opinion and journalism was obliterated years ago. They're not news organizations, they're one big op-ed. The editorial boards of both use their...

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, has been forced to spend half a million dollars defending himself in court for having stood up to former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The only way to spare himself from the defamation lawsuit he has been fighting, he and his lawyer say, would be to lie.The lawsuit centers on a 2020 video that purported to show election fraud in Georgia. The video, which was presented to state lawmakers, showed security footage of election workers tabulating ballots in Atlanta. Multiple news media outlets and the secretary of state’s office...

Just heard that today, during our amazing Rally in the Great State of Michigan, esteemed Florida Circuit Court Judge, Robert L. Pegg, issued a Powerful Decision totally and completely DENYING the Pulitzer Prize Board’s desperate attempt to dismiss my ironclad Defamation Lawsuit against them for awarding the once respected Pulitzer Prizes to Fake News Stories about the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax by The Failing New York Times and The Washington Compost. The Judge specifically stated that the Fake Stories, and the Prizes awarded them, have been debunked by several Government Investigations. He did not allow Pulitzer to hide behind the...

The case may not be as well known (yet), but CNN could be facing a defamation liability rivaling or exceeding the $787 million Fox News paid out to Dominion Voting Systems. NewsBusters recently reported on Florida’s First District Court of Appeals affirming that plaintiff Zachary Young could seek punitive damages, in addition to economic and emotional damages, from the Cable News Network in a civil trial after they allegedly defamed him regarding his work in getting people out of Afghanistan. The total could near or exceed $1 billion. For that outcome to be remotely in the cards, Young needed to...

A jury has awarded more than $1.1 million to an Idaho drag performer who accused a far-right blogger of defaming him when she falsely claimed that he exposed himself to a crowd, including children, during a Pride event in June 2022. The Kootenai County District Court jury unanimously found Friday that Summer Bushnell defamed Post Falls resident Eric Posey when she posted a doctored video of his performance with a blurred spot that she claimed covered his “fully exposed genitals,” the Coeur D’Alene Press reported. In reality the unedited video showed no indecent exposure, and prosecutors declined to file charges....

Alex Jones on Thursday moved to liquidate his personal assets, agreeing to demands from the families of Sandy Hook victims whom he owes more than $1.5 billion in damages over his lies about the 2012 school massacre. ...Prior to Thursday, Jones had resisted converting his personal bankruptcy into a Chapter 7 liquidation. But facing mounting legal pressure, he reversed course and caved to the demands of the Sandy Hook families, who have still not seen a penny from Jones since juries in Connecticut and Texas found him liable in 2022 for defamation and emotional distress. His lawyers said in a...

President Donald Trump requested a new trial in the civil case brought against him by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that at some point she could not precisely remember in the mid-1990s he had sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman department store in midtown Manhattan, and that request has been denied by a federal judge. Carroll was awarded $83 million in a defamation suit following a win in her civil suit, in which a New York City judge and jury determined that Trump was civilly liable for sexual assault. The case did not meet...

A federal judge rejected former President Trump’s latest attempt for a new trial, upholding the verdict and $83.3 million award in his defamation case against writer E. Jean Carroll. In a written opinion, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said Trump’s arguments are “without merit.” “Mr. Trump’s malicious and unceasing attacks on Ms. Carroll were disseminated to more than 100 million people. They included public threats and personal attacks, and they endangered Ms. Carroll’s health and safety,” Kaplan wrote. A jury in January ordered him to pay $83.3 million to Carroll after Kaplan found he was liable for defamation. Last month,...

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear the case of Nicholas Sandmann, a former Kentucky high school student who sued several news outlets for allegedly libelous coverage of his viral encounter with a Native American activist in 2019. Justices decided not to take up Sandmann’s petition against several outlets, including ABC News, The New York Times, Gannett, and others, leaving in place a lower court’s dismissal of the massive libel suit. The former student argued he was defamed by reports about his confrontation with Native American activist Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., five years ago....

As many of you know, late on Thursday a Washington, DC jury found that a) plaintiff Michael E Mann had suffered no actual damages from Steyn's National Review post; but b) ordered defendant Steyn to pay him one million dollars anyway. Late on Friday, the otherwise lethargic District of Columbia Superior Court entered the jury's verdict in final judgment. What happens now? Well, in the next few weeks, there will be certain "renewed" motions from defendants that one is obliged to do, although they are highly unlikely to find favor with Judge Irving. After that, the case will be appealed...

In the old days, American newspapers dispatched court reporters to cover trials for what they were: legal proceedings. Today, they don't send any reporters to court, but get their "climate correspondent" or "environment reporter" to file a story about "attacks on scientists" - even though, in this case, the "scientist" is the plaintiff. Into this wasteland of groupthink hackery came everyone's favourite Irish double-act, Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, with an innovative and energetic format: Sit in court all day soaking up the atmosphere and the corridor conspiracies, and get a cast of professional actors to re-enact all the best...

Conservative pundit and radio host Mark Steyn has been ordered by a jury to pay a former Penn State professor and "climate scientist" $1 million in damages in a defamation lawsuit about blog posts, published in 2012, criticizing the professor's work. via AP:The jury in Superior Court of the District of Columbia found that [think tank fellow Rand] Simberg and Steyn made false statements, awarding Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each writer. It awarded punitive damages of $1,000 from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn, after finding that the pair made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance...

On Wednesday, late in the day at 4pm Deep State Standard Time, Mann vs Simberg and Steyn finally went to the jury, and they retired to deliberate. So now we await their verdict - as, on this same day just a few blocks away, President Trump awaits the decision of a supposedly "conservative" Supreme Court on whether he can be permitted to appear on the ballot. I am exhausted by what passes for "justice" in America, and I expect he feels the same. In my case, the last phase of the trial - closing arguments - began yesterday after lunch:...

Michael Mann is not a victim. That was the theme of Mark's closing today in court. The judge began the day by reading the jury instructions and the afternoon was devoted to closing arguments. First up was the Plaintiff's counsel. Then Victoria Weatherford on behalf of Rand Simberg. And then Mark. The Plaintiff then got 15 minutes to rebut the Defenses' closing before the jury began its deliberations. By this point, any one of Mark's readers could write the Plaintiff's closing. Mann was severely wronged... his life was terrible... That Mark and Rand are guilty of actual malice and knowingly...

Today, after twelve years of procedural bollocks and four weeks of trail, Mann vs Simberg and Steyn will supposedly be going to the jury. We shall see. Mark has not been well this week, but he hopes to be sufficiently healthy to deliver his closing argument. Our friends Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer will be there of course, as they have been every day - unlike slipshod outlets such as NPR, for whom court reports do not involve actually sending a reporter to court, or The Washington Post, who dispatched their "climate reporter" to cover a trial. The poor lad...

Let's recap where the case stands as we enter the final days of the (Climate) Trial of the Century. Michael Mann sued Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn in 2012 for defamation after the "statements at issue" were published. The case then languished in the DC court system for 12 years. It has cost the Defendants millions in legal fees — not to mention the immeasurable physical toll to Mark and Rand. Now, in court, the onus is on the Plaintiff to prove the Defendants acted with malice and that there was harm incurred due to the blog posts. So, has...