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NC Lt. Gov. Sues CNN For $50M: I'm Not A Perv, I'm The Hapless Pizza Guy!

Not porny at all, dude.

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meat lovers pizzaMark Robinson does not go to porn shops, you guys. He’s just really generous. But if you did see him hanging out at a porn shop in the 90s, he was probably just there bringing free pizza to the clerks. It’s what Jesus would do!

Yes, that is literally what North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor and current Republican candidate for governor is saying in a $50 million defamation suit against CNN and Louis Love Money, one of the former porn shop clerks, who wrote a song about seeing him there all the time.

In the 1990s, Mark Robinson was a young father, struggling to provide for his family. During this period, he worked at Papa John’s pizza, eventually being promoted to manager, where he sometimes managed the closing shift. Nearby was an adult video store where Defendant Money worked. Lt. Gov. Robinson, who has always been a gregarious, outgoing person, made friends with Defendant Money, who also worked the night shift. He would occasionally bring over free pizza and socialize. More often, however, Defendant Money would come over to the Papa John’s, looking for free or discounted pizza.

(Isn’t this exact scene in basically every porno?)

On September 19, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck published an article entitled “‘I’m a black NAZI!’: NC GOP nominee for governor made dozens of disturbing comments on porn forum,” accusing Robinson of posting extremely graphic comments on a website called NudeAfrica.com. They wrote that Robinson used the handle “minisoldr” on the site, as well as on platforms like Disqus and Black Planet, alongside his photo. They also matched Robinson’s biographical details with those shared by “minisoldr,” such as his location and the year of his marriage.

The article may have been inspired by an interview Money did two weeks earlier with The Assembly, a North Carolina news site which Robinson describes as “a major online publication with links to George Soros.” Because if you absolutely, positively did not say all those horrible antisemitic things those liars are accusing you of, ranting about an octogenarian Jewish philanthropist in a court filing is the way to go!

And the article may have been inspired by a video posted in August by Money’s punk band The Trailer Park Orchestra, which suggests that Robinson failed to pay the clerk for a bootleg compilations of hardcore porn sourced from New York City, where obscenity laws were less stringent. The video had somewhere south of 10,000 views before Robinson filed this dumb turkey of a “Streisand Effect” lawsuit.

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“In a malicious hit job so well timed as to be uncanny, they have published disgusting lies about Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson in what appears to be a coordinated attack aimed at derailing his campaign for governor, and has already inflicted immeasurable harm to his family, his reputation, and his good name,” Robinson rails.

Robinson is going with the Shaggy Defense, insisting that it absolutely, positively wasn’t him saying all those things that contradict his conservative, Christian public persona:

[CNN] 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. Any person could have purchased and/or used Lt. Gov. Robinson’s data to create accounts all over the internet. As CNN is aware, people who create accounts on websites like NudeAfrica, and AdultFriendFinder prefer not to use their own names and identities for obvious reasons.

Robinson alleges defamation and defamation per se against Money and CNN, and claims he’s entitled to punitive damages because “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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Actual malice cannot be established by demonstrating the defendant’s “antipathy, ill-will, and desire to inflict harm” as a matter of North Carolina law. And North Carolina has a pretty strong reporter’s shield statute as well. But that didn’t bother Robinson or his lawyer, Jesse Binnall, who gave a press conference yesterday to announce their suit.

No time (or stomach) for the video? Let me save you some time: They definitely called the articles a “high tech lynching” designed to interfere with the election. And they promised that, even though they don’t have proof of recklessness by CNN today, they’re totally gonna kick some loose in discovery.

Whatever you say, minisoldr.

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

 

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