A federal judge in Kentucky Friday threw out a defamation lawsuit filed against The Washington Post by Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann and his family over the paper’s reporting of an incident between the young man and a Native American man this past January in Washington.
The lawsuit, which was filed in February, sought $250 million in damages and accused the Post of practicing “a modern-day form of McCarthyism” by targeting Sandmann and “using its vast financial resources to enter the bully pulpit by publishing a series of false and defamatory print and online articles … to smear a young boy who was in its view an acceptable casualty in their war against the president.”
Sandmann became the focus of outrage after a video of him standing face-to-face with a Native American man, Nathan Phillips, while wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat surfaced and rapidly spread online. Sandmann was one of a group of Covington students attending the anti-abortion March for Life in Washington, D.C., while Phillips was attending the Indigenous Peoples’ March on the same day.
In a 36-page ruling, U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman noted that the Post never mentioned Sandmann by name in its initial coverage of the incident, referring only to groups of “hat wearing teens.” Bertelsman added that “the words used contain no reflection upon any particular individual” and thus could not be constituted as defamation. The judge also ruled that the newspaper used language that was “loose, figurative,” and “rhetorical hyperbole” which is protected by the First Amendment. – READ MORE