RALEIGH, NC — CNN wants a court to throw out a defamation lawsuit filed by Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, which is challenging its report that he made explicit posts on a pornography website’s message board. The network says Robinson presented no evidence that the network believed his story was false or aired it recklessly.

The September report said Robinson, who ran unsuccessfully for governor this month, left statements more than a decade ago on the message board in which he, in part, referred to himself as a “black NAZI” and said he liked transgender pornography. says he preferred Adolf Hitler to then-President Barack Obama and criticized the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “worse than a maggot”.

Robinson, who wanted to become the state’s first black governor, said he didn’t write those posts and sued in October, just before in-person early voting began.

While filing a motion to dismiss Thursday in Raleigh federal court, CNN’s lawyers said Robinson’s arguments suggesting he was the likely victim of a computer hacking operation that created fake messages would require a series of events that did not they are not only “implausible, but ridiculous”.

Generally, a public official claiming defamation must prove that a defendant knew a statement they made was false or made it without regard to the truth.

“Robinson has not and cannot plausibly allege facts showing that CNN published the article with actual malice,” attorney Mark Nebrig wrote in a brief supporting the motion to dismiss, adding that the lawsuit “does not include a single allegation that to demonstrate that CNN doubts its veracity. of his reporting.”

For Robinson, who already had a history of inflammatory comments on topics such as abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, the CNN story nearly brought down his campaign. After the report was released, most of his top campaign staff quit, advertising at the Republican Governors Association stopped and fellow Republicans distanced themselves from him, including President-elect Donald Trump.

Robinson lost to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein by nearly 15 points and will leave office at the end of the year.

Robinson’s lawsuit was originally filed in state court. It says, in part, that CNN chose to run its report on data from the NudeAfrica website, which had been hacked several years ago and was running on vulnerable, outdated software. His lawsuit alleges the network did nothing to verify the posts. He is seeking monetary damages.

Thursday’s memo highlights the network’s story, including a section where CNN reporters showed how they connected Robinson to a username on the NudeAfrica website.

As the CNN story previously reported, the memo said the network matched the account details on the message board with other online accounts held by Robinson, comparing the username, an email address and his full name. The details the account holder discussed matched the length of Robinson’s marriage, where he was living at the time, and that both Robinson and the account holder had mothers who worked at a historically black university, the memo said. CNN also said it found matches of the figureheads used by both the NudeAfrica account holder and Robinson’s social media posts.

“This is not a case where, as Robinson claims, CNN ‘deliberately ignored or avoided the truth’ instead of investigating,” Nebrig said, later adding that the network “had no reason to seriously doubt that Robinson is the author of the posts”.

Attorneys for Robinson did not immediately respond to an email Friday seeking comment. The lawsuit says anyone could have used Robinson’s breached data to create Internet accounts.

His state lawsuit also brought charges against Louis Love Money, a former porn store worker who claimed in a music video and media interview that for several years beginning in the 1990s, Robinson frequented a porn store where Money worked and that Robinson bought porn videos from him. . Robinson said that was untrue.

Money filed his own motion to dismiss in the state lawsuit. But CNN has since moved the suit to federal court, saying it’s the right place for a North Carolina resident like Robinson and a Georgia company like CNN and that the claims against Money are unrelated.