NC governor candidate Mark Robinson sues CNN over report about posts on porn site

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson announced a lawsuit Tuesday against CNN over its recent report alleging he made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board, calling the reporting reckless and defamatory.

The lawsuit, filed in Wake County Superior Court, comes less than four weeks after a television report that led many fellow GOP elected officials and candidates, including presidential nominee Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign. Robinson announced the lawsuit at a news conference in Raleigh.

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“When times of trouble come in this thing we call politics, it separates the strong folks from the weak,” Robinson said. “The weak will turn and run, the strong will stand and fight.”

Channel 9 obtained a copy of the lawsuit on Tuesday. In it, Robinson’s team doesn’t lay out any findings backing up their claims that alleged comments made on a porn website may have been created by artificial intelligence.

It 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.”

Robinson’s attorney offered an explanation for why the story ran in the first place.

“A left-wing media outlet is going to do everything they can to stop this man from being governor because they know that this man has the ability to connect with voters in a way that quite frankly scares them,” Jesse Binnall said.

CNN declined to comment when Channel 9′s Hunter Sáenz asked for a response to the lawsuit.

The CNN report said Robinson left statements over a decade ago on the message board in which, in part, he referred to himself as a “black NAZI,” said he enjoyed transgender pornography, said that he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama, and slammed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “worse than a maggot.”

Binnall said now that they have filed the lawsuit, more details will come out in discovery.

>> Sáenz is digging through the lawsuit and is also talking with Attorney General Stein, Robinson’s gubernatorial opponent.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

(WATCH BELOW: Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, hospitalized, treated for burns, sources say)

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, hospitalized, treated for burns, sources say

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