North Carolina Lt. Governor (and apparent comments section aficionado) Mark Robinson announced on Tuesday that he has filed a lawsuit against CNN. Three guesses what his beef is with the network.
Robinson is suing over CNN’s recent story accusing Robinson of making racial and sexual comments on a porn site, which the politician called defamatory. He announced the lawsuit, which was filed in Wake County Superior Court, during a news conference in Raleigh.
Associated Press has reported that the lawsuit claims 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 report revealed Robinson left comments from over a decade ago on the message board in which he called himself a “black NAZI,” said he preferred Hitler over then-President Barack Obama and claimed to partake in transgender pornography.
These alleged comments stand in stark contrast to Robinson’s public stances. Robinson has previously insisted that people should only use bathrooms that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth.
He has also said that transgender women should be arrested for using women’s bathrooms. In an interview with CNN, Robinson vehemently denied that he made the remarks on Nude Africa.
“This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me,” Robinson said. “I’m not going to get into the minutia of how somebody manufactured this, these salacious tabloid lies.”
However, Robinson has a history of saying and doing things like mocking school shooting survivors, belittling the civil rights movement and supporting total abortion bans without exceptions for rape or incest.
Public polling has shown that Robinson is currently losing the governor’s race to his Democratic opponent Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general. Despite his latest scandal, Robinson believes he will somehow come out victorious.
“We are not getting out of this race,” he has previously stated. “There are people who are counting on us to win this race.”