WASHINGTON ― North Carolina Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson on Tuesday filed a $50 million lawsuit against CNN after the news site reported on years of disturbing comments he appeared to have made on a porn site forum.
With his attorney at his side, Robinson, who is currently the state’s lieutenant governor, said he’s suing for defamation after a CNN report last month uncovered troubling comments he apparently made in a forum on a porn site, Nude Africa, including referring to himself as a “black Nazi” and describing being sexually aroused by spying on women in showers.
The report also appeared to show Robinson calling himself a “perv” who likes pornography featuring transgender people ― a sharp contrast with his present-day transphobic rhetoric.
“What this amounts to is, to quote Clarence Thomas, this is a high-tech lynching on a candidate who has been targeted from day one by folks who disagree with me politically and want to see me destroyed,” Robinson said at a press conference. “We are going to take these first steps to fight against what we consider to be one of the greatest examples of political interference in the state’s history and quite possibly this nation’s history.”
Those are some dramatic statements, but for now, that’s all he’s got. CNN meticulously reported its story and laid out how, exactly, it connected Robinson to the trove of comments in the porn site forum. Robinson didn’t present any new evidence to back up his claims in his lawsuit.
Robinson’s lawyer, Jesse Binnall with the Binnall Law Group, didn’t exactly present the strongest legal argument for their defamation case, either.
“A left-wing media outlet is going to do everything they can to stop this man from being governor because they know this man has an ability to connect with voters in a way that, quite frankly, scares them,” Binnall said.
CNN declined to comment to HuffPost.
Republicans ― including the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump ― have been distancing themselves from Robinson ever since the story came out. Virtually all of his senior staff have resigned, both from his campaign and his government office. Most quit en masse after Robinson reportedly rejected multiple offers from supporters to use technology to investigate who made the comments on the porn site forum. Politico, meanwhile, found that the person using the Nude Africa account that reportedly belonged to Robinson had accessed the porn site from a location not far from his home.
And for all his outrage over the story, Robinson has even left the door open to the possibility that he did indeed make those comments.
But on Tuesday, he emerged defiant and denied that he made any of them.
Binnall filed the defamation suit in Wake County’s superior court. Robinson is seeking damages for “reputational harm” from CNN and from a North Carolina resident, Louis Love Money, a former Greensboro adult video store employee. Money told a local news site in September that Robinson frequented his store “five nights a week” and bought hundreds of “super hardcore” bootleg videos that were too extreme to sell in the state.
Money did not respond to a request for comment on social media.
Notably, Robinson admitted in his lawsuit that he used to go by Money’s porn shop, but said he was a manager at a Papa John’s pizza shop at the time and just went by to “bring over free pizza and socialize” because he has “always been a gregarious, outgoing person.”
Here’s a copy of the lawsuit:
Robinson has a long and public history of making sexist, degrading and generally offensive remarks. Most were on social media and can still be viewed, including his declaration that former first lady Michelle Obama emanates “the stench of human waste,” and his claim that women need to “get this under control,” which he said while gesturing near his groin as he condemned abortion and birth control. He’s mocked Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement as “crap,” and made blatantly Islamophobic comments. (“Someone should open an Islamic theme park,” he said on Facebook. “That would be a blast.”)
Robinson is running for governor against Josh Stein, the state’s Democratic attorney general. Stein has been leading in the polls for months, but has increased his lead more recently.
During an unrelated Tuesday press conference about hurricane recovery efforts, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) was asked if he thinks Robinson should step down given CNN’s report and the fact that he would be acting governor if Cooper were out of the state.
The governor slowly shook his head as the reporter posed the question.
“I have said for years that he should step down from his position because of extreme positions that he has taken in his attacks on people,” Cooper said. “I don’t think he’s qualified.”
He also condemned Robinson for intentionally spreading misinformation about the government’s response to Hurricane Helene, which decimated parts of western North Carolina last month. Neo-Nazis, right-wing influencers and some elected Republicans have been fanning lies and sowing chaos about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency provides assistance to survivors. Some have lied and told survivors that FEMA isn’t coming to help or that it is going to take people’s property.
“There is significant progress being made,” Cooper said of recovery efforts. “We want to make sure that the disinformation the lieutenant governor is perpetuating and continuing to share on social media, that we are making sure that we protect people on the ground in trying to get the true information to people. He needs to stop it.”