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I dunno, setting aside the litigation specifics (the stuff about this being the product of a default judgment due to his refusal to comply with discovery requests etc.) I don't really have any objections. He dragged individual families who were not public figures through the mud in front of a massive audience, accusing them of lying about the deaths of their own children, in pursuit of some flagrantly delusional claims. Seriously messed up behavior and he deserves what he's getting. Yes the specific figure the jury came up with is disproportionate, but juries often do that when there's a sympathetic plaintiff, which is why even Antonin Scalia agreed with a substantive due process right of defendants to have judges knock excessive jury awards back down to the realm of reason, as will likely happen here too if Jones doesn't shit the bed again with his appeal. If the figure was awarded directly by a judge, I guess he's SOL subject to bankruptcy protections, but that's what you get for horribly and specifically defaming a huge group of innocent private families for years on end in front of a bizarrely large audience. Don't do that!
I was glad when the kid in Smirkgate was able (presumably) to drag cash out of the media organizations who defamed him during the summer fever dream of 2020, and I likewise don't feel bad for Jones here. Defamation has always been an exception to the first amendment, and unlike other putative exceptions for hate speech and the like I don't think it poses any kind of systemic risk to the right to voice opinions and ideas in public.
Smirkgate kid got all his cases dismissed for being "objectively unverifiable" so the media's response was just non-actionable opinions. Which means they're broad or vague enough that you can't objectively say they're false. Though he did settle with CNN and The Washington Post before the trial was dismissed so he got something.
Other kids at the school trying to file a suit pseudonymously had their case thrown out for being pseudonymous but it was also stated that it would have been dismissed anyway because of the same reason as above.
Source? This is internally inconsistent. Yes, CNN and WaPo settled--which means, they gave Nick some substantial amount of money, amount not publicly known. They would not have done so if his cases were dismissible.
https://www.businessinsider.com/covington-kid-nicholas-sandmann-loses-lawsuits-against-abc-nyt-others-2022-7
Assuming that the judge's dismissal holds up on appeal, it sounds like either CNN and WaPo's coverage was meaningfully different from the other media defendants, or that their legal counsel screwed up in a big way approving unnecessary settlements. No competent attorney will settle for any amount of money if he can 12(b)(6) before discovery and be done.
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Source? This is internally inconsistent. How can it be known that they gave him substantial amounts of money when the terms of the settlement are secret?
Because settlements are agreed to by both parties--a compromise. There would be no point for Nick and his attorneys to agree to a trivial settlement when they could go to trial instead and potentially win big. If the case was easily dismissible, CNN and WaPo would not have settled for any amount; they would have just filed a motion to dismiss and moved on.
Nick undoubtedly got a fair bit less than he was suing for, but still a substantial amount of money. That's how settlements work.
Plural's contention was that there was in fact almost no potential to win big, so the settlement may very well have been trivial.
That wasn't my contention that was the judge's contention when he struck the suit. WaPo and CNN settled the case last year. The rest of his cases were struck down by a judge a few months ago, I assumed people here would've been aware of that. I saw it Deadline with all the comments celebrating that the racists lost. I guess if no one makes a top level post about it here it might as well never have happened.
Your line of reasoning also assumes that each media outlet had the exact same level of potential culpability which would be impossible unless they all posted the same articles and made the same tweets. It's possible CNN and WaPo settled because they thought the cases against them were strong and the other outlets didn't settle because the cases against them were weaker.
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"Substantial" is probably low six figures. Once he had enough of a case to get to discovery, CNN and WaPo are interested in it going away even with a very high likelihood of success on their part. He certainly was not wearing a "I am a multi-millionaire" suit in his appearance during the RNC.
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I've said it before, it's kind of the same thing as what happened with LeafyIsHere. You're always playing with fire whenever you're calling attention to someone specifically. You can either leave out names or be very specifically vigilant about trying to keep people from "tapping the glass," as Fredrik Knudsen might put it.
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