Corrections & clarifications: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the year of Nicholas Sandmann’s confrontation with Nathan Phillips.
A federal judge has dismissed a massive libel lawsuit filed by former Kentucky high school student Nicholas Sandmann against Gannett, the parent company of USA TODAY, and other media organizations, saying they reported opinion protected by the First Amendment.
Sandmann had sued Gannett and five of its publications – USA TODAY, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Detroit Free Press, the Louisville Courier Journal and the Tennessean –seeking $195 million. He argued he was defamed by their reports on his confrontation with Native American rights activist Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial in January 2019.
A video of Sandmann, then 16 and a student at Covington Catholic in Northern Kentucky, standing nose to nose with Phillips went viral and unleashed a firestorm of internet criticism that the student’s conduct was racially motivated, which Sandmann denied. Phillips was attending an “Indigenous People’s March” while Sandmann was walking in a “March for Life” event.
In all, Sandmann filed lawsuits against eight media organizations, including the New York Times, ABC News, CBS News and Rolling Stone magazine, seeking a combined $1.25 billion for their coverage of the event.
But U.S. Senior Judge William Bertelsman dismissed Sandmann’s lawsuit against Gannett, the New York Times, ABC and CBS, holding Tuesday that Phillips’ statement that Sandmann “blocked him and wouldn’t allow him to retreat” – as reported by the media – was his opinion for which they could not be sued.
“The media defendants were covering a matter of great public interest, and they reported Phillips’s first-person view of what he experienced,” Bertelsman wrote, throwing out the suits.
The Washington Post, NBC and CNN had previously settled with Sandmann.
Todd McMurtry, an attorney for Sandmann, said: “We are disappointed with the decision. We plan to appeal.”
Media outlets and their lawyers hailed the ruling.
Mike Abate, an attorney for Gannett, noted that the news organizations were covering a matter of “national and international importance” and that Bertelsman properly concluded that Phillips’ quote was an opinion that could neither be proven true or false.
Abate said the decision is important, “particularly in the digital age, because it illustrates that individuals who may be upset about how they are treated by others online cannot sue media outlets for fairly reporting on the newsworthy matters in which they were involved.
“Courts are still going to look to what the stories said and ask if those stories – and not the public’s reaction to them – are defamatory,” Abate said.
In an email, Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The New York Times, said the decision “reaffirms that The Times provided a fair account of the controversy surrounding the events that took place that day on the National Mall.”
Sandmann was shown in a video wearing one of former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign hats while smiling at Phillips, who was beating a drum and chanting.
Some social media at the time claimed the incident was racially charged on the part of the white teenager, which Sandmann and other witnesses disputed. Sandmann sued, saying the news coverage had unfairly defamed him.
But Bertelsman had previously narrowed Sandmann’s suit to focus only on whether the quote attributed to Phillips was defamatory. Phillips accused Sandmann of “blocking” him as he tried to approach the monument, which Sandmann adamantly denied.
In the judge’s ruling, Phillips recounted: “It was very much my experience that Mr. Sandmann was blocking me from exiting the situation. It was very much my experience that he intentionally stood in my way in order to stop me from moving forward.”
Bertelsman concluded that Phillips’ statements that “the guy in the hat … blocked” him and “wouldn’t allow (him) to retreat” were “objectively unverifiable and thus unactionable.”
Bertelsman granted the news outlets’ motions to dismiss and denied Sandmann’s motion for a judgment before trial.
In his suit against NBC, Sandmann said the network “unleashed its vast corporate wealth, influence and power against Nicholas to falsely attack him despite the fact that at the time, he was a 16-year-old high school student.”
The suit became a cause celebre for conservatives and talk show hosts.
Then-President Donald Trump defended Sandmann and his fellow student on Twitter, claiming that they had been “smeared” with false reports by the media.
In an opinion piece for Fox News in 2020, Sandmann said he had enrolled at Transylvania University and described himself as a pro-life conservative.
A federal judge previously dismissed a defamation and harassment suit brought by a dozen Covington Catholic students against some of the same news outlets, saying they had different levels of exposure in media coverage.
A similar state lawsuit filed by a dozen anonymous Covington Catholic students was also dismissed and is being appealed.