New media journalists Cassandra Fairbanks and Mike Cernovich attended the White House press briefing in April.
While in the briefing room the two journalists stood at the lectern and took a photo that they later tweeted out.
The two were flashing the “AOK sign.”
Later that day Fusion writer Emma Roller accused Fairbanks and Cernovich of flashing a white power hand gesture.
TGP interviewed former Sputnik News writer/reporter, Cassandra Fairbanks, back in April about her plans to sue the Fusion reporter and or Fusion for starting the lies.
On Thursday Cassandra Fairbanks sued Emma Roller for defamation.
I have filed a lawsuit against Emma Roller of Fusion and the New York Times for defamation over the photo of me and @Cernovich at the WH pic.twitter.com/huQiy4mdtA
— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) June 1, 2017
Buzzfeed reported:
A pro-Trump journalist and political activist sued a Fusion reporter in federal court in Washington, D.C. Thursday, the most serious action yet in the emerging conflict between mainstream news outlets and the insurgent conservative media that has set up shop in the nation’s capital.
In the complaint, shared with BuzzFeed News, lawyers for Cassandra Fairbanks allege that Emma Roller, the Fusion journalist, defamed their client when she tweeted an image of Fairbanks at the White House making what Roller claimed in a caption is a “white power hand gesture.”
Fairbanks is represented by Robert Barnes, a Malibu attorney best known for high profile clients such as Wesley Snipes and Ralph Nader. In the suit, Barnes pits “independent, outsider writers, scribes, advocates, and journalists… a new media” against an “increasingly distrusted elite-backed press.” Mainstream media organizations “view the First Amendment as a wholly owned property of elite-backed journalists to smear and slime their adversaries at will,” the complaint reads. “The First Amendment is meant to protect the Cassandra Fairbanks’ of the journalism world: independent, alternative voices of truth in a sea of fake news.”
At the time of the photograph at issue, Fairbanks was an employee of the Russian government-owned website Sputnik. Now she works for Big League Politics, a new, far-right politics site founded by a former staffer of Breitbart, the far-right news site previously run by Steve Bannon,
Here’s a copy of the lawsuit via Mike Cernovich.
