US governor candidate Mark Robinson sues CNN over porn forum claims

North Carolina’s Robinson denies report he wrote racially and sexually explicit posts and called himself a ‘black Nazi’.

North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson has moved to sue CNN, contesting the US network’s claims that he posted obscene sexual and racial comments on a pornography site.

Robinson announced the lawsuit at a press conference on Tuesday, slamming the news organisation’s reporting as a “high-tech lynching”.

The suit comes less than a month after CNN published a report detailing the explicit internet posts allegedly made by Robinson, who is the Republican candidate in the race to become North Carolina’s next governor.

According to CNN, Robinson left statements on the message board of a pornography website called “Nude Africa”, in which he, in part, described himself as a “black NAZI”, said that he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama, and slammed the assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr as “worse than a maggot”.

The allegations pushed many Republican officials and candidates, including US presidential nominee Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson, who now trails his Democratic opponent in the polls by double digits.

Fighting back against the allegations, Robinson’s legal team claimed the email address cited by CNN as being linked to the pornography site posts had been compromised.

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 Nude Africa account — were previously compromised by multiple data breaches”, the lawsuit said.

Robinson’s lead lawyer Jesse Binnall added: “Lt. Gov. Robinson has always said that these allegations are completely false. Our investigation has shown that he’s quite frankly right about that.”

Robinson claimed the report in the lead-up to the November 5 election amounted to “political interference” of the worst kind “in this state’s history”.

Polls at the time of the CNN report already showed Robinson with less support than his Democratic rival Josh Stein, North Carolina’s sitting attorney general. Early in-person voting begins Thursday statewide, and well over 50,000 completed absentee ballots have been received so far.

CNN, in its report on Robinson’s alleged posts, said Robinson put his full name on the account used to post graphic content on the Nude Africa site, along with an email address consistent with his online activity for decades.

The network said it only repeated a “small portion” of Robinson’s online comments due to their “graphic nature”.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies