A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed five libel lawsuits filed by a former Covington Catholic student against national media outlets.
Judge William Bertelsman, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, issued a summary judgment in favor of Gannet (owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer and USA Today), The New York Times, CBS News, ABC News, and Rolling Stone.
The suits arose from an event on the National Mall in January of 2019. Nicholas Sandmann, then a 16-year old student, was with other Covington Catholic students in the nation’s capital to attend the annual March for Life, an anti-abortion rights demonstration, and while those students were spending their final hours in D.C., some became engaged in a back-and-forth with a group of Black Hebrew Israelites who had been antagonizing them with racist and homophobic slurs.
The students responded, as seen in videos that circulated on social media from the event, by performing the Colonels’ well-known school chants.
During one chant performance, a Native American activist, Nathan Phillips, who had been in D.C. for the Indigenous Peoples March, which also happened that day, approached the Covington Catholic students while playing a drum and chanting.
The initial images that were distributed from the scene that day appeared to indicate that Sandmann stood in the way of Phillips, preventing him from moving forward. Early on, there was no mention of the Black Hebrew Israelites’ presence or involvement.
Media characterization of the event suggested that Sandmann and Cov Cath students acted improperly, alleging that they surrounded Phillips and that Sandmann in particular had been antagonistic by refusing to move from Phillips’s path.
Additional videos emerged not only to show the involvement and instigation by the Black Hebrew Israelites but also that Phillips was the one who approached the students. Some videos also showed Sandmann appearing to quiet his fellow students so as to be respectful to Phillips.
Phillips went on to do interviews, portraying himself as a victim in the infamous encounter.
Sandmann filed lawsuits against numerous media outlets, reaching separate settlements with CNN, NBC News, and The Washington Post.
The lawsuits against the five other media companies were filed separately in March of 2020. All five sought a dismissal of the case, which Bertelsman granted together this week.
A comment from Phillips about Sandmann, published in some form by the outlets, was at the center of the lawsuits dismissed Tuesday. Sandmann and his legal team characterized the comment as libelous. “It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: “I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,” Phillips had said, as published. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”
Bertelsman cited multiple prior cases as precedent in his dismissal.
“Applying the above legal authorities, and with the benefit of a more developed record, 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,” Bertelsman wrote. “Instead, a reasonable reader would understand that Phillips was simply conveying his view of the situation. 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.”
Bertelsman argued that neither Phillips nor Sandmann could know the other’s state of mind in that moment, and that reasonable readers of Phillips’s comment would understand that it was expressed as Phillips’s opinion of the events.
Sandmann’s attorney, Todd McMurtry, told the Herald-Leader that an appeal would be filed.