WASHINGTON ― North Carolina Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson said Tuesday that he has filed a $50 million lawsuit against CNN after the news site reported on years of disturbing comments he appeared to have madeon a porn site forum.
Standing with his attorney, Robinson, who is currently the state’s lieutenant governor, said he’s suing for defamation after a CNN report last month uncovered troubling comments he apparently made in a forum on a porn site, Nude Africa, including referring to himself as a “black Nazi” and describing being sexually aroused by spying on women in showers.
The report also appeared to show Robinson calling himself a “perv” who likes pornography featuring transgender people ― a sharp contrast with his present-day transphobic rhetoric.
“What this amounts to is, to quote Clarence Thomas, this is a high-tech lynching on a candidate who has been targeted from day one by folks who disagree with me politically and want to see me destroyed,” Robinson said at a press conference. “We are going to take these first steps to fight against what we consider to be one of the greatest examples of political interference in the state’s history and quite possibly this nation’s history.”
Those are some dramatic statements, but for now, that’s all he’s got. CNN meticulously reported its story and laid out how, exactly, it connected Robinson to the trove of comments in the porn site forum.
Robinson’s lawyer, Jesse Binnall with the Binnall Law Group, didn’t exactly present the strongest legal argument for their defamation case.
“A left-wing media outlet is going to do everything they can to stop this man from being governor because they know this man has an ability to connect with voters in a way that, quite frankly, scares them,” Binnall said.
CNN declined to comment to HuffPost.
Republicans ― including the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump ― have been distancing themselves from Robinson ever since the story came out. Virtually all of his senior staff have resigned, both from his campaign and his government office. And for all his outrage over the story, Robinson has even left the door open to the possibility that he did indeed make those comments.
But on Tuesday, he emerged defiant and denied that he made any of them.
Binnall said he filed the defamation suit on Tuesday morning in Wake County’s superior court. Robinson is seeking damages for “reputational harm” from CNN and from a North Carolina resident, Louis Money, a former Greensboro adult video store employee. Money is one of several people who told a local news site in September that Robinson frequented his stores to watch explicit videos.
Robinson has a long and public history of making sexist, degrading and generally offensive remarks. Most were on social media and can still be viewed, including his declaration that former first lady Michelle Obama emanates “the stench of human waste,” and his claim that women need to “get this under control,” which he said while gesturing near his groin as he condemned abortion and birth control. He’s mocked Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement as “crap,” and made blatantly Islamophobic comments. (“Someone should open an Islamic theme park,” he said on Facebook. “That would be a blast.”)
Robinson is running for governor against Josh Stein, the state’s Democratic attorney general. Stein is currently leading in the polls.
