North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson announced Tuesday he was suing CNN and a porn store employee for defamation.
CNN published a story last month regarding Robinson’s alleged racist and sexually explicit posts on message boards of the porn site NudeAfrica, where he detailed his preferences, described himself as “black Nazi” and derided Martin Luther King Jr., among other things.
Roughly two weeks before CNN’s story, local North Carolina outlet The Assembly reported Robinson was a frequent customer at multiple porn stores in Greensboro during the 1990s and 2000s.
The fallout from the stories led multiple campaign staffers to resign and many high-profile Republicans to distance themselves from Robinson as he refused to step down from his position as lieutenant governor while denying the allegations.
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.
The suit specifies Louis Love Money, a former porn shop employee named in The Assembly’s story, as a defendant.
“Lt. Gov. Robinson was not spending hours at the video store, five nights a week. He was not renting or previewing videos, and he did not purchase ‘bootleg’ or other videos,” the suit says.
Robinson is seeking $50 million in damages.
In recent polls, Robinson trails Democrat Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general, by double digits.