Judge Sides With ABC, CBS, New York Times And Other Outlets In Libel Cases Filed By Nick Sandmann Over Lincoln Memorial Incident

deadline.com:

A federal judge has granted summary judgment to ABC, CBS, The New York Times, Gannett and Rolling Stone, rejecting libel claims by former high school student Nick Sandmann over an incident at the Lincoln Memorial that went viral in 2019.In a video, Sandmann, in Washington with other Covington Catholic High School students for the March for Life rally, was shown face to face with a Native American activist, Nathan Phillips, who was at the Lincoln Memorial for the Indigenous People’s March.

Social media users quickly pounced on the clips, with many concluding that it showed Sandmann trying to intimidate Phillips.Sandmann sued a number of outlets for defamation, including reporting, citing Phillips’ account, that the student was blocking him.U.S.

District Judge William Bertelsman wrote that the media outlets, in reporting on the incident, “were covering a matter of great public interest, and they reported Phillips’s first-person view of what he experienced.

This would put the reader on notice that Phillips was simply giving his perspective on the incident.”Bertelsman wrote that “the Court concludes that Phillips’s statements that Sandmann ‘blocked’ him and ‘wouldn’t allow [him] to retreat’ are objectively unverifiable and thus unactionable opinions.”“Instead, a reasonable reader would understand that Phillips was simply conveying his view of the situation,” the judge wrote. “And because the reader knew from the articles that this encounter occurred at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, he or she would know that the confrontation occurred in an expansive area such that it would be difficult to know what might constitute ‘blocking’ another person in that setting.”After the incident sparked a furor on social media, a longer