Nick Sandmann files $250 million lawsuit against Washington Post

Feb 20, 2019 by Jill

by Claire Chretien, LifeSite:

In what they say is “just the first of many,” lawyers for Covington Catholic High School junior Nick Sandmann filed a $250 million lawsuit against the Washington Post today.

“The Post rushed to lead the mainstream media to assassinate Nicholas’ character and bully him,” high-profile attorneys Lin Wood and Todd McMurty wrote in a summary of their lawsuit. The newspaper “[fanned] the flames of the social media mob into a mainstream media frenzy of false attacks and threats against Nicholas.”

Sandmann and his fellow Covington classmates became the target of false accusations of racism after a selectively edited video of them waiting for their bus after the 2019 March for Life was shared on social media. The video purported to show the boys harassing an elderly Native American veteran. But additional extended video and firsthand accounts soon revealed the man, Nathan Phillips, was the one who waded into the group waiting for its bus and decided to beat a drum inches from Sandmann’s face, and other adults who accompanied Phillips shouted racial taunts at the kids. The kids had been performing school cheers in an attempt to drown out the harassment, and did not respond to adults’ insults and abuse in kind.

No video showed the teens chanting “build the wall,” as was widely reported.

In addition to the video evidence that vindicated Sandmann and his peers, it then came to light that Phillips did not actually serve in Vietnam as he and multiple media outlets reported he did, has a violent criminal record, and attempted to lead protestors in disrupting Mass at the Basilica of National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception – where many pro-life events take place around the March for Life – just one day after he confronted Sandmann.

Sandmann’s lawyers call Phillips a “phony war hero” in their detailed timeline of events that led up to the activist’s accosting of the underage boys.

The lawsuit says the Washington Post engaged in “unlawful and bullying conduct at Nicholas.” The 115-pound 16-year-old, who was on his first-ever out-of-state field trip without his family, “suffered substantial reputational and emotional harm” as a result of the Post’s false reporting, his lawyers say. “The Post’s campaign to target Nicholas in furtherance of its political agenda was carried out by using its vast financial resources to enter the bully pulpit by publishing a series of false and defamatory print and online articles which effectively provided a worldwide megaphone to Phillips and other anti-Trump individuals and entities to smear a young boy who was in its view an acceptable casualty in their war against the President.”

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