WASHINGTON — North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson said Tuesday he has filed a $50 million lawsuit against CNN after the news site reported on years of disturbing comments he appeared to have made on a porn site forum.
Along with his attorney, Robinson, who is currently the state’s lieutenant governor, said he is filing a defamation lawsuit. a CNN report last month discovered disturbing comments he apparently made on 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 found that Robinson referred to himself as a “pervert” who enjoys pornography featuring transgender people – a sharp contrast to his contemporary transphobic rhetoric.
“What this amounts to is, to quote Clarence Thomas, this is a high-tech lynching of a candidate who has been targeted from day one by people who disagree with me politically and want to see me destroyed,” Robinson said at a news conference. . “We will take these first steps in the fight against what we consider to be one of the greatest examples of political interference in the history of the state and possibly the history of this country.”
Those are some dramatic statements, but for now that’s all he has. CNN meticulously reported her story and explained how exactly it linked Robinson to the many comments on the porn site’s forum.
Robinson’s attorney, Jesse Binnall of the Binnall Law Group, didn’t exactly present the strongest legal argument for their defamation case.
“A left-wing media is going to do everything it can to stop this man from becoming governor because they know this man has the 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 distanced themselves from Robinson since the story broke. Nearly all of his senior staff have resigned, both from his campaign and from his government office. And for all his outrage over the story, Robinson even did that left the door open on the possibility that he did in fact make these comments.
But on Tuesday he came out defiantly and denied creating one.
Binnall said he filed a defamation suit in Wake County Superior Court on Tuesday morning. Robinson is seeking damages for “reputational damage” to CNN and to North Carolina resident Louis Money, a former employee of an adult video store in Greensboro. Money is one of many people told a local news site in September that Robinson visited his stores to watch explicit videos.
Robinson has one long and public history of making sexist, derogatory and generally offensive comments. Most were on social media and can still be viewed, including his statement blasting former first lady Michelle Obama “the stench of human waste,and his claim that women “need to get this under control,” he added gesticulating near his crotch while condemning abortion and contraception. He is mocked Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement as “nonsense,” and made blatantly Islamophobic comments. (“Someone should open an Islamic theme park,” he said on Facebook. “That would be great.”)
Robinson is running for governor against Josh Stein, the state’s Democratic attorney general. Stein is currently at the top of the polls.