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Originally Posted by ecriture d'adulte
The acquittal is largely irrelevant. I don't think in the history of the country a single person who's been arrested and on trial for killing people has won a defamation suit against a third party for calling them a murderer. If he had a case against Biden or whoever, he would have a much better case against the state for arresting and trying him in the first place. There the damages are trivial to show. But we know his arrest and trial was 100% reasonable and in good faith regardless of what the jury says so he has 0 case. The Covington kid was never charged with anything so in a completely different category and I'm guessing settled for nuisance money because they knew they didn't have a good case for serious damages.
Mark Geragos, a celebrity lawyer who is most famous for representing Kaepernick against the NFL, was doing a podcast around that time and guessed the CNN settlement was around $2M, which could be considered "nuisance money" given how high these settlements can go.
However, he did think the MAGA kid had a legitimate case, as there was evidence that CNN (and other media outlets who also quietly settled) were deliberately misleading their audiences as far as what actually had happened. There was evidence they had seen video that hadn't been released to the public yet in context to know what they were presenting wasn't an accurate depiction of events, and they went forward with their preferred narrative anyways.
For the Rittenhouse case there is no evidence that anyone who disparaged him was doing anything other than giving their honest opinion of what happened based on what they saw, so it is hard to argue defamation under those circumstances.
The real amusing thing with the media portrayal of the MAGA kid incident is that if you actually watch the entire video of what was goin on at that time, there was a group of "Black Israelite" activists (I dont remember the exact name of the group, but it was something like that) who were throwing extremely vulgar racist and sexist verbal abuse at the Indian American activists (so basically they were doing exactly what the media was insinuating the MAGA kid was doing x100) and the media just completely ignored this and it never even came up, as it didn't fit the preferred narrative.
Last edited by TheNoGod2; 06-15-2022 at 11:53 PM.