Lieutenant Governor Mark Robison and his attorney Jesse Binnall announced a formal lawsuit against CNN on Tuesday morning in Raleigh.
CNN published a story last month that accused Robinson of making racial and sexual comments on adult websites in the early 2000s. These allegations caused a major shake-up in his campaign with key senior staff members resigning days after the story’s publication which Robinson continues to deny.
“Today, we are taking the first step to do exactly what I said I was going to do after these scurrilous attacks were launched against myself and my family. We are holding CNN accountable,” said Robinson. “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.”
Jesse Binnall is taking CNN and their buddies to task for the attacks against me and my family.
— Mark Robinson (@markrobinsonNC) October 15, 2024
This will go down as the greatest case of election interference in our state’s history.
They are going to pay the price and we are going to win the election!
The lawsuit, filed in Wake County Superior Court, is seeking $50 million in damages, citing the harm done to Lieutenant Governor Robinson’s reputation. It also alleges several inconsistencies in CNN’s reporting.
“It chose to publish despite knowing or recklessly disregarding that Lt. Gov. Robinson’s data—including his name, date of birth, passwords, and the email address supposedly associated with the NudeAfrica account—were previously compromised by multiple data breaches,” the legal filing states. “Any person could have purchased and/or used Lt. Gov. Robinson’s data to create accounts all over the internet.”
“What our investigation has shown so far is that there were a number of inconsistencies that were used that went beyond journalistic standards in the way that CNN performed their reporting,” said Binnall. “When you use information that is taken from data breaches, and you don’t properly verify that information — information, that was available to anyone on the dark web for instance — if you take that and then put it as the truth on your website, that can be one thing that is a reckless disregard for the truth.”
Robinson’s attorney also raised concerns about whether this constituted some form of election interference.
“This lawsuit lays out the effort to as the lieutenant governor said use a high-tech lynching in order to interfere with North Carolina’s 2024 gubernatorial election,” said Binnall.” We expect to find that there are more bad actors that have been involved in this process to interfere with the election and there is more to come. There have been those that have tried to interfere with our investigation by stonewalling and to them I will say that we will use every tool at our disposal now that a lawsuit has been filed including subpoena power in order to continue pursuing the facts.”
Robinson stated that he will continue his campaign and expects to “win this election despite the attack.”