RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina. Mark Robinson CNN filed a lawsuit Tuesday over its recent report that he posted explicit racist and sexual messages on the message board of a pornographic website, calling the reporting reckless and defamatory.

The lawsuit, filed in Wake County Superior Court, comes less than four weeks after a report that led many fellow GOP elected officials and 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, has denied being the author of the messages.

CNN “chose to publish despite knowing or recklessly ignoring that Lieutenant Governor Robinson’s data – including his name, date of birth, passwords and the email address allegedly associated with the NudeAfrica account – had previously been compromised due to multiple data breaches,” the lawsuit said. states, referring to 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 from Day 1 has been targeted by people who disagree with me politically and destroyed me want to see.’

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

The CNN report, which first aired on September 19, said Robinson left statements on the message board more than a decade ago in which he partially referred to himself as a “black NAZI,” said he enjoyed transgender pornography, said he favored Hitler over then-President Barack Obama, and named Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘worse than a maggot’.

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

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

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

Robinson denies the allegations 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 videos, and he did not purchase any bootleg or other videos from Defendant Money.”

Money said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he stands by his statements and the content of the video clip as truthful: “My story has not changed.”

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

Robinson’s lawyer, Jesse Binnall, said he expects to find more “bad actors” and that entities, which he did not identify, have held back his company’s efforts to collect information.

“We will use every tool at our disposal now that a lawsuit has been filed, including subpoena power, to continue to pursue the facts,” said Binnall, whose clients include Trump and his campaign.

In North Carolina courts, a public official claiming defamation generally must show that a defendant knew a statement was false or recklessly disregarded its falsity.

Most of the top staff Running Robinson’s campaign and his lieutenant governor’s office folded after the CNN report, and the Republican Governors Association, which had already spent millions of dollars on advertising to back Robinson, stopped supporting his bid. And Democrats, from presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris to state candidates, began running ads linking their opponents to Robinson.

Robinson’s campaign now includes no TV commercials. He said that “we have chosen to go in a different direction” and focus on in-person campaign stops.

Robinson already had a history of inflammatory comments on topics such as abortion and… LGBTQ+ rights that Stein and his allies have emphasized in their opposition in TV commercials and online.

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

Hurricane Helene and its aftermath took the CNN report off the front pages. Robinson worked with a central North Carolina sheriff for several days to collect relief supplies and criticized Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper — who was unable to seek reelection because of term limits — for the state government’s response in the initial phase of the relief.

Trump endorsed Robinson before the March gubernatorial election, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids” for his speaking skills. Robinson has been a regular at Trump’s campaign stops in North Carolina, but he has not participated in such an event since the CNN report.