North Carolina governor candidate Mark Robinson sues CNN over report about posts on porn site
North Carolina Republican Lt.Gov. Mark Robinson sued CNN on Tuesday over its recent report that he made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board, calling the reporting reckless and defamatory.The lawsuit, filed in Wake County Superior Court, comes less than four weeks after a report that led many fellow GOP elected officials and candidates, including presidential nominee Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign.Robinson, who announced the lawsuit at a news conference in Raleigh with a Virginia-based attorney, has denied authoring the messages.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,” the lawsuit states, referencing the website.Robinson, who would be the state’s first Black governor if elected, called the report a “high-tech lynching” on a candidate “who has been targeted from Day 1 by folks who disagree with me politically and want to see me destroyed.”CNN declined to comment Tuesday, spokesperson Emily Kuhn said in an email.The CNN report, which first aired Sept.
19, said Robinson left statements over a decade ago on the message board in which, in part, he referred to himself as a “black NAZI,” said he enjoyed transgender pornography, said he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama, and slammed the Rev.Martin Luther King Jr.
as “worse than a maggot.”The network report said it matched details of the account on the message board to other online accounts held by Robinson by comparing usernames, a known email address and his full name.CNN reported that details discussed by the account holder matched Robinson’s age, length of marriage and other biographical information.CNN also said it compared figures of speech that came up freque...