North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson on Tuesday announced a lawsuit against CNN over its recent report alleging that he made racially and sexually explicit posts on a pornography website's message board, calling the report reckless and defamatory. .
The lawsuit, filed in Wake County Superior Court, comes less than four weeks after a television report that led many Republican elected officials and candidates, including Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson's gubernatorial campaign. Robinson announced the lawsuit at a news conference in Raleigh.
CNN “chose to publish despite knowing or recklessly ignoring that Robinson's data – including his name, date of birth, passwords and the email address allegedly associated with the NudeAfrica account – was previously compromised by multiple data breaches,” the lawsuit states.
CNN declined to comment, spokeswoman Emily Kuhn said in an email.
Polls at the time of CNN's report already showed Democratic rival Josh Stein, the incumbent attorney general, with a lead over Robinson. Early in-person voting begins Thursday across the state and more than 50,000 completed absentee ballots have been received so far.
The CNN report said Robinson left statements more than a decade ago on the message board in which he, in part, referred to himself as a “black NAZI,” said he enjoyed transgender pornography, said he preferred Hitler Barack Obama and harshly criticized The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr is “worse than a worm.”
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