The porn saga of North Carolina’s lieutenant governor is modern lawfare in a nutshell

I’m honestly not sure which part of North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s freshly filed defamation lawsuit to focus on here.

The obvious lede is that Robinson — currently the Republican nominee for North Carolina governor — sued CNN for defamation yesterday. The suit targets the network for publishing meticulously documented allegations that Robinson made a series of bizarre and frequently bigoted comments on a porn forum called Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012, including referring to himself as “a black NAZI” (capitalization in original).

Robinson’s lawsuit claims someone likely impersonated him using information from data breaches, which is certainly possible — but based on the evidence would require a remarkably complex level of deception targeting a man who wouldn’t enter politics until many years later in 2018. The statements arguably aren’t even much worse than things Robinson has unquestionably said. It seems just as plausible that Robinson is the latest public figure to weaponize the law against his critics in bad faith, following the pro-censorship lead of more powerful conservatives like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Speech law is serious! But the lawsuit also happens to include a very funny encapsulation of the current feedback loop between politics and viral entertainment. Because, in addition to naming CNN, Robinson is suing a North Carolina punk singer and former adult video store clerk named Louis Love Money over an obscure YouTube music video that accuses Robinson of not paying $25 for a bootleg porn tape more than 20 years ago.

Money (not his birth name, according to the lawsuit) is part of a band called Trailer Park Orchestra, which, in August 2024, released a song and associated music video called “The Lt. Governor Owes Me Money.” Its core allegation — as outlined above — is not high on the political scandal barometer. But in a handy bit of publicity for Money, North Carolina publication The Assembly picked up and bolstered his claim that the avowedly conservative Christian gubernatorial candidate had been a regular at the store in the 1990s and 2000s. CNN cited The Assembly when detailing the Nude Africa claims, raising the report’s profile.

Robinson’s counter: he was just bringing over pizza.

Robinson also implies there are sinister motives at work because the music video and CNN report came out while he was running for governor. (Maybe there’s mileage in pretending not to understand some pretty basic concepts of publicity.)

This may turn out to be the most straightforward Streisand effect of the 2024 election cycle. Robinson’s alleged porn store visits were far from the focus of CNN’s report. Trailer Park Orchestra’s music video was posted two months ago and had a mere 13,000 views on YouTube yesterday; it’s gained about 2,000 since the suit was filed. (“I had no idea this existed until reading his lawsuit,” one commenter notes.) While the CNN report damaged Robinson’s standing in the Republican party, we’re talking about a man who won his primary after minimizing the Holocaust on Facebook. The long-term reputational damage he’s facing is unclear, and ignoring Money’s claims in particular would be the simplest way to make them disappear.

Regardless of whether Robinson wins his suit, legal complaints have become a valuable political rallying point — they’re a great way to justify raising money and position yourself as a fighter while putting a grievance in the public record. Despite the fact that the most successful recent defamation claims have been against conservative media juggernauts like Alex Jones and Fox News, there’s an ongoing Republican attempt to dismantle the speech protections that have long let journalists (and average citizens) freely criticize public figures. Every new defamation suit is a shot at getting the Supreme Court to finally make that call. At least this one has a soundtrack.