Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, the embattled Republican nominee for governor, filed a defamation lawsuit on Tuesday against CNN, which published an article last month linking him to lewd and offensive comments made years ago on a pornography website.
Mr. Robinson said at a news conference in Raleigh, N.C., that he had not made the comments that the CNN report attributed to him.
The report said that in posts on a porn site called Nude Africa, Mr. Robinson, who is running as a social conservative, described himself as a “black Nazi,” defended slavery and wrote that he enjoyed watching transgender porn.
“When times of trouble come in this thing we call politics, it separates the strong folks from the weak,” Mr. Robinson said at the news conference on Tuesday, standing with his lawyer, Jesse Binnall. “The weak will turn and run, and the strong will stand and fight. And that’s what we’re doing here today.”
CNN declined to comment on the lawsuit. The network has said that it connected the porn-site comments to Mr. Robinson by matching his email address and the username “minisoldr” to other online accounts belonging to him. CNN also reported that the “minisoldr” account had discussed topics that corresponded with Mr. Robins’s interests and biographical information, such as his age and the length of his marriage.
The lawsuit comes nearly a month after CNN published its article, sending Mr. Robinson’s campaign into crisis. The campaign had already been struggling, with Mr. Robinson facing scrutiny for his history of inflammatory rhetoric.
But the porn-site comments, which CNN said were posted between 2008 and 2012, were particularly troubling to Mr. Robinson’s Republican allies, who have largely deserted him since they came to light.
The civil complaint Mr. Robinson filed in Wake County Superior Court also lists a man named Louis Money as a defendant. Mr. Money was cited and quoted in an article last month in The Assembly, a news website in North Carolina, saying that Mr. Robinson had frequented pornography stores in Greensboro, N.C., where Mr. Robinson is from, in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Mr. Money, who worked in several such establishments in Greensboro decades ago, told The Assembly that Mr. Robinson frequently watched pornography in private booths in those days.
Mr. Money released a music video in August with his band, Trailer Park Orchestra, saying that Mr. Robinson owed him money for porn videos.
Asked about the claims in the lawsuit, Mr. Money said in an interview Tuesday morning that Mr. Robinson was “full of dookie.”
“I love it,” Mr. Money said about the lawsuit. “The only reason I put this song out and done these interviews is because I want publicity for the Trailer Park Orchestra. And thank you, Mark!”
The complaint states that the comments on the Nude Africa site that CNN attributed to Mr. Robinson were “sourced from hacked, data breach files, obtained from the dark web.” The complaint also claims that Mr. Robinson’s data had been “previously compromised by multiple data breaches” and that any person could have purchased or used that data to “create accounts all over the internet.”
When his lawyer, Mr. Binnall, was asked at the news conference for direct evidence to support the lawsuit’s claims, he said, “We will have the opportunity to go forward and prove what we have put in the complaint, and we are confident in our in our ability to do that.”
Mr. Binnall, who has also represented former President Donald J. Trump, said that he expected to find “more bad actors that have been involved in this process to interfere with the election.” Mr. Robinson is seeking $50 million in damages.
Mr. Robinson faced criticism even before the CNN report for comments he made years ago on Facebook that critics saw as antisemitic, racist and transphobic. His poll numbers suffered after his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, ran an ad showing Mr. Robinson saying in a 2019 video: “An abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It’s about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
But it was not until the CNN report that Mr. Robinson’s Republican allies largely deserted him.
Mr. Trump has distanced himself from Mr. Robinson as well. Other Republicans have privately fumed over the predicament that Mr. Robinson has put the party in, since he can no longer withdraw from the race and have his name removed from the ballot.
Some Republicans had asked Mr. Robinson to either sue CNN or drop out of the race. Now that a lawsuit has been filed, it remains unclear whether it will assuage concerns from conservatives about his candidacy. Those concerns include whether Mr. Robinson’s presence on the ballot will affect Mr. Trump’s chances of winning North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes, which his campaign considers crucial.
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