Mark Robinson of North Carolina is suing CNN over a porn site report

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina's Republican lieutenant governor. Mark Robinson sued CNN on Tuesday over the recent report that he posted explicitly racist and sexual posts on a pornography website's message board, calling the coverage reckless and defamatory.

The lawsuit, filed in Wake County Superior Court, comes less than four weeks after a report that led many elected officials and GOP candidates, including presidential candidate Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson's gubernatorial campaign.

Robinson, who announced the lawsuit at a news conference in Raleigh with a Virginia-based attorney, denied writing the messages.

CNN “chose to publish knowing or recklessly ignoring that Lt. “Governor Robinson — including his name, date of birth, passwords, and email address allegedly associated with the NudeAfrica account — were previously compromised by multiple data breaches,” the lawsuit says, citing the website.

Robinson, who would be the state's first black governor if elected, called the report a “high-tech lynching” of a candidate “who has been targeted from day one by people who disagree with me politically and.” want to see my destruction.”

CNN declined to comment Tuesday, spokeswoman Emily Kuhn said in an email.

The CNN report, which first aired Sept. 19, said Robinson left message board statements more than a decade ago in which he sometimes referred to himself as a “black Nazi,” said he enjoyed transgender pornography and said he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama and criticized the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “worse than a maggot.”

The network report said the message board account's details were matched to Robinson's other online accounts by comparing usernames, a known email address and his full name. CNN reported that the details discussed by the account holder matched Robinson's age, length of marriage and other biographical information. CNN also said it compared phrases that appeared frequently on his public Twitter profile and appeared in discussions on the account on the pornographic website.

Polls at the time of CNN's report already showed Democratic rival Josh Stein, the incumbent attorney general, with a lead over Robinson. Early in-person voting begins statewide on Thursday and more than 57,000 completed mail-in ballots have been received so far.

In the same lawsuit, Robinson also sued a Greensboro punk rock band singer who claimed in a music video and in an interview that Robinson frequently visited a porn store where the singer once worked in the 1990s and early 2000s and purchased videos. Louis Love Money, the other named defendant, released the video and spoke to other media outlets before the CNN report.

Robinson disputes the claim in the lawsuit, which states: “Lt. Governor Robinson didn't spend hours at the video store five nights a week. He did not rent or preview any videos, nor did he purchase any “pirated copies” or other videos from Defendant Money.”

Money said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he believes his statements and the content of the music video to be true: “My story hasn't changed.”

The lawsuit, which seeks at least $50 million in damages, says the action against Robinson “appears to be a coordinated attack designed to derail his campaign for governor.” It provides no evidence that the network or Money colluded with outside groups to make false statements, according to Robinson.

Robinson's lawyer, Jesse Binnall, said he expected to find more “bad actors” and that companies he did not identify had blocked themselves his company's efforts to collect information.

“We will use every tool at our disposal after a lawsuit is filed, including subpoena power, to pursue the facts,” said Binnall, whose clients included Trump and his campaign.

In North Carolina courts, a public official alleging defamation generally must prove that the defendant knew a statement was false or that he recklessly disregarded its falsity.

Most top employees After running Robinson's campaign, he resigned as lieutenant governor following the CNN report, and the Republican Governors Association, which had already spent millions of dollars on advertising supporting Robinson, stopped supporting his bid. And Democrats, from presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris to candidates from down-ballot states, began running ads linking their opponents to Robinson.

Robinson's campaign is not currently running any TV commercials. He said that “we decided to take a different path” and focus on in-person campaign stops.

Robinson has made inflammatory comments on issues such as abortion, etc. in the past LGBTQ+ rights Stein and his allies have emphasized this when they opposed him in television commercials and on the Internet.

Stein spokesman Morgan Hopkins said in a statement Tuesday: “Even before the CNN report, North Carolinians have long known that Mark Robinson is completely unfit to be governor.”

Hurricane Helene and its aftermath pushed the CNN report off the front pages. Robinson worked with a sheriff in central North Carolina for several days to collect supplies and criticized Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper – who was barred from running for re-election due to term limits – for the state government's response in the early stages of the relief effort.

Trump endorsed Robinson ahead of the March gubernatorial primary, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids” because of his oratory skills. Robinson was a frequent presence at Trump's campaign stops in North Carolina but has not attended such an event since the CNN report.