Appeals court reinstates Project Veritas defamation lawsuit against CNN
The lawsuit claimed that CNN falsely implied that Twitter banned Project Veritas for spreading misinformation, when in fact the ban was for a different reason.
A ruling from an appeals court has revived Project Veritas’s lawsuit against CNN, stating that the nonprofit journalism group has made a plausible claim of defamation based on false statements made by the news outlet.
In 2021, Twitter banned Project Veritas for sharing private information without consent, following a video posted by the group showing a Facebook official’s residence. CNN’s Ana Cabrera shared this information on Twitter, and a subsequent article by Brian Fung detailed the events.
Four days later, during a CNN program, Cabrera mentioned the ban on Project Veritas in the context of cracking down on misinformation spread. The U.S. district judge initially dismissed Project Veritas’s suit against CNN, stating that the remarks made were substantially true in effect due to their similarity to discussing the actual reason for the ban.
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Project Veritas has presented enough evidence to proceed with the case against CNN, as per the appeals court ruling. The court did not rule on whether Cabrera’s remarks constituted actual malice, which is essential for state defamation claims.
