Covington Catholic student sues The Washington Post

Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann, who was featured prominently in a viral video confrontation with a Native American protester after last month’s March for Life in Washington, D.C., has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post. The suit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Kentucky, accuses the Post of targeting the teenager and misrepresenting his actions during the Jan. 18 encounter with Native American activist Nathan Phillips outside the Lincoln Memorial.

Sandmann was with a group of students from the Park Hills, Ky., high school in a video that appeared to show the students mocking Phillips. But additional footage revealed that the students, who were waiting for buses to take them home, had not tried to confront Phillips and were actually responding to protesters with the Black Hebrew Israelites religious sect who were verbally accosting passersby. Sandmann said later that the students harbored no ill will toward Phillips. Private investigators for a Kentucky diocese this week found the students did not instigate the confrontation.

The lawsuit claims that the Post was “one of the first, if not the first, mainstream outlet to expand coverage of the Jan. 18 incident from social media to mainstream media,” The Washington Times reported. A Post representative told the Times the newspaper would fight the lawsuit.