Courts, Government

Good Job, Jesse Binnall, You Finally Read The North Carolina Pleading Standards

And you pro hac-ed in, too!

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999210A week ago, North Carolina Lt Gov Mark Robinson sued CNN and a former porn store clerk for $50 million. At a press conference with his MAGA lawyer Jesse Binnall, the Republican gubernatorial candidate vowed to clear his name in the face of a “high tech lynching.”

Perhaps the lawsuit was a response to pressure on Robinson from fellow Republicans to refute the allegations of a sordid online history or step aside. But the complaint seems only to have amplified the stories, drawing attention to a music video posted by Louis Love Money, a former porn store clerk who alleges that Robinson was a regular back in the early 2000s.

It’s a banger.

The complaint itself was less of a banger, though. It was extremely hand-wavy on North Carolina law, which requires “clear, strong and convincing evidence that, at the time of the publication, the defendant either knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard of whether the statement was false” when the plaintiff is a public figure.

Instead it mumbled about “antipathy” and called the allegations “unverifiable” — which would appear to concede that the allegations were not verifiably false:

Defendant CNN acted with actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth, as demonstrated by Defendant’s antipathy, ill-will, and desire to inflict harm on Lt. Gov. Robinson, CNN’s actual knowledge of the dubious nature and timing of the allegations, its use of unverifiable data to corroborate its reporting, its reckless failure to investigate, and its knowledge of exculpatory information and alternative explanations that it deliberately omitted from the CNN Article.

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But even more hilariously, the complaint whiffed on North Carolina’s pleading Rule 8(A)(2), which says:

In all negligence actions, and in all claims for punitive damages in any civil action, wherein the matter in controversy exceeds the sum or value of ten thousand dollars ($10,000), the pleading shall not state the demand for monetary relief, but shall state that the relief demanded is for damages incurred or to be incurred in excess of ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Money immediately moved to dismiss and for sanctions, noting that the rule was enacted to “prevent excess demands from leaking publicly in the media and tainting the judicial process.” Or, as here, being trumpeted on national television as a sort of exclamation point under Robinson’s vociferous denials.

But Binnall, former president Trump’s lawyer, was not deterred. Yesterday he filed a mildly amended complaint, with the ad damnum clause tweaked to read “an amount to be proven at trial, in excess of twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000.00)” rather than the original “amount to be proven at trial, but no less than fifty million dollars ($50,000,000.00).”

The amended complaint still confuses “actual malice” with “antipathy,” but … baby steps.

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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