RALEIGH — North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor, has filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN and a former adult video store employee.
The lawsuit includes two counts of defamation and defamation per se against Louis Love Money and CNN, respectively. It seeks compensatory, special and punitive damages, as well as discharge of any income the defendants have made from their alleged defamatory statements.
The complaint specifically requests “no less than” $50 million.
“Lt. Gov. Robinson can never be fully compensated for the damage done by Defendants’ lies. His private and public lives have been devastated. Friends and family have turned their backs on him,” the lawsuit states. “He has been humiliated.”
At a Tuesday morning press conference, Robinson and his attorney, Jesse Binnall of the Binnall Law Firm, announced the lawsuit. Robinson called CNN’s reporting a “high-tech lynching.”
“After these scurrilous attacks were launched against myself and my family, we are holding CNN accountable and we are going to get to the bottom of what’s going on here,” said Robinson. “And we are glad to be here today to be able to do that. I said at the very beginning 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.”
Binnall said he and a group of “seasoned trial attorneys,” specialists and a former FBI agent had been investigating CNN’s reporting over the past three weeks. He said the CNN report was being used to interfere in the 2024 North Carolina gubernatorial election and said their investigation had been met with “stonewalling” by various parties involved.
“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. He went on to add that CNN didn’t properly verify information in their report that was “available to anyone on the dark web.”
When Binnall was asked if they were alleging CNN’s report was false, Binnall replied, “Yes, we are alleging it is false, and that’s what our lawsuit says.”
Binnall said the posts in CNN’s report could have been made by anyone and that they are no longer available to inspect.
“We believe it is very suspect that they were taken down so soon after the story ran without an ability to do a full investigation on this,” said Binnall.
“I’m saying that a left-wing media outlet is going to do everything they can to stop this man from being governor because they know that this man has an ability to connect with voters in a way that, quite frankly, scares them,” said Binnall when asked if they believed CNN manufactured the story. “And they don’t want him to be involved in politics at any level, and so that’s I think we’ve seen here.”
Binnall also said on Oct. 1 that CNN had been asked for a retraction, a request the outlet declined.
“We have asked to be able to examine the data that CNN used in their reporting. They have declined to give us access to that information,” said Binnall. “They have declined to show their work and how they arrived at these conclusions.”
Binnall later said filing the lawsuit would open up the discovery process to obtain some of that information.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Wake County Superior Court, alleges that the defendants engaged in a “malicious hit job” and published “disgusting lies” about Robinson, causing “immeasurable harm to his family, his reputation, and his good name.”
The complaint addresses the timing of the allegations, noting that they surfaced just weeks before an important election and suggests the timing, combined with the dubious nature of the sources and the failure to properly investigate, points to a deliberate attempt to derail Robinson’s political career.
The complaint begins by describing the lieutenant governor as “the first black man to hold that title in North Carolina” and emphasizes his background as a community leader, advocate for education and Constitutional rights, and a role model who overcame poverty and a difficult childhood.
The lawsuit centers on two main sources of alleged defamation.
First, Money, described as a 52-year-old who “sings in a local punk rock band called Trailer Park Orchestra,” is accused of making false statements about Robinson in a music video and subsequent interview.
The music video, titled “The Lt. Governor Owes Me Money,” allegedly depicts Robinson entering a pornography store to purchase videos. In an interview with The Assembly, Money claimed that Robinson was a “frequent customer” at the adult video store where Money worked in the 1990s and early 2000s. He also told Raleigh-based WRAL that he would be the “first to admit” he made up the song to make money. “Yes. Yes, I did,” Money told WRAL in September. “But it is a true story.”
The complaint states that Money falsely alleged Robinson “hung out at the X-rated video store ‘five nights a week’ — sometimes until 4:00 a.m. — ‘spending a good amount of money,’ paying $8 per video to preview ‘two or more’ porn videos a night in a private booth and purchasing ‘hundreds’ of ‘bootleg’ porn videos for $20-$25 apiece.”
Robinson categorically denies the allegations, stating that while he did occasionally interact with Money when he worked at a nearby Papa John’s, he “was not spending hours at the video store, five nights a week. He was not renting or previewing videos, and he did not purchase ‘bootleg’ or other videos from Defendant Money.”
The second source of alleged defamation is a CNN article titled, “‘I’m a black NAZI!’: NC GOP nominee for governor made dozens of disturbing comments on porn forum.”
The lawsuit claims CNN falsely attributed statements from a pornographic website, NudeAfrica.com, to Robinson. These statements allegedly include “several lewd, sex-obsessed, racist, and outrageous statements.”
CNN’s report was published nearly a month ago and linked Robinson to an old internet handle “minisoldr,” which CNN said made racist, sexual posts on a porn site called Nude Africa. Robinson denied the allegations and has remained in the race for governor despite several of his campaign staff and official lieutenant governor staff departing following the CNN article.
The complaint argues that CNN published these allegations despite Robinson’s explicit denials and without proper verification. It states, “CNN knew that supposed archives from a suspicious website like Nude Africa were unreliable and failed to meaningfully investigate or digitally scrutinize them.”
The lawsuit also accuses CNN of using “unverifiable, dark web-sourced data breach files” and disregarding the fact that Robinson’s personal data had previously been compromised in data breaches.
Robinson’s legal team sent a retraction demand to CNN on Oct. 1 and requested that CNN produce its source material for forensic scrutiny. According to the complaint, CNN refused to retract the article and has not provided the requested source material.
The lawsuit alleges that both Money and CNN acted with “actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth.”
It accuses Money of taking “great pleasure from the publicity he is receiving from these lies” and suggests he timed his allegations to coincide with the upcoming election.
As for CNN, the complaint alleges that the news organization “intended to damage Lt. Gov. Robinson’s gubernatorial run” and “published the CNN Article and attributed the ‘minisoldr’ posts to Robinson despite harboring doubt over the veracity and verifiability of the supposedly supporting information and deliberately avoided the truth.”
