Sandmann and other Covington Catholic students had been in Washington to attend a March for Life anti-abortion rally.According to this account, the students responded with permission from the teacher chaperones by shouting "school spirit" chants before Phillips waded into scene playing his drum.A private investigation firm commissioned by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington in Park Hills, Kentucky, to review the incident concluded last month that there was no evidence the students provoked a confrontation.""The CNN accusations are totally and unequivocally false, and CNN would have known them to be untrue had it undertaken any reasonable efforts to verify their accuracy before publication," the complaint said.Instead, the report found that the teenagers were met at the Lincoln Memorial by offensive statements directed at them by several African-American protesters from a group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann in federal court in Kentucky, seeks $275 million in compensatory and punitive damages over the videotaped incident in the nation&China Combined Grinding Machine39;s capital."Last month, Sandmann sued the Washington Post for $250 million over its reporting of the same incident..Trump has a contentious relationship with CNN, frequently calling it "Fake News.The complaint said CNN, a division of Turner Broadcasting System Inc-owned Warner Media LLC, aired four "defamatory" broadcasts and nine online articles falsely accusing Sandmann, 16, and his classmates of "engaging in racist conduct.Kentucky: A Kentucky teenager sued CNN on Tuesday for defamation, saying the cable network falsely conveyed to viewers that he was the "face of an unruly hate mob" confronting a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in January.