Fox News and several other media outlets have been hit with a significant lawsuit after falsely accusing a man of being a white supremacist mass shooter.
In May 2023, a mass shooting at a mall 25 miles north of Dallas claimed the lives of eight innocent people. Authorities eventually identified the shooter as Mauricio Garcia, a Nazi sympathizer.
The problem for Fox News and others was that they ran a photo of the wrong Mauricio Garcia, a 36-year-old man who unfortunately shared the name of the deceased gunman.
Per Mediaite:
The Mauricio Martinez Garcia who was the actual gunman was 33 years old and was shot dead by police officers who responded to the scene. News reports in the aftermath of the shooting described him as armed with an AR-15 and wearing a tactical vest with a “RWDS” patch on it, an acronym for “Right Wing Death Squad,” a phrase popular among white supremacists, multiple Nazi tattoos, as well as social media posts that indicated neo-Nazi beliefs and other racially- and ethnically-focused violent rhetoric.
Amateur internet sleuths dug up a 2022 mugshot of the 36-year-old Garcia, when he was arrested for an unrelated matter, and claimed he was the shooter. That was incorrect, but the photo nonetheless went viral online – and was also shared in reports by multiple television networks and podcasts.
Garcia's lawsuit, filed in county court in Austin, Texas, names as defendants Fox News, Newsmax, Univision, Steven Crowder and his Louder with Crowder media company, podcaster Tim Pool's company Timcast Media Group, host of InfoWars' War Room Owen Shroyer, Jason Lee's podcast company Hollywood Unlocked, Today News Africa, and that outlet's White House correspondent Simon Ateba. Each of the defendants is accused of having “recklessly disregarded basic journalistic safeguards” by publishing “the photo of an innocent man, branding him as a neo-Nazi murderer to his local community and the nation at large” in reports dated May 7 through 9, 2023.
The complaint, first reported by The Huffington Post, describes in detail the reports by each of these media outlets and personalities that “displayed a graphic with a photograph of the Plaintiff” or “used an image of innocent 36-year-old Plaintiff Mauricio Garcia to portray the gunman,” “failed to exercise reasonable care in verifying the accuracy of the photograph published to depict the mass murderer,” and “acted with reckless disregard for the truth and published the photo while willfully ignoring elementary journalistic precautions.”
The complaint alleges that Garcia sent retraction demand letters for each of the alleged false reports, but none were published.
Several defendants stand accused of using plaintiff Garcia's appearance to refute claims that the shooter was a white supremacist and suggest a conspiracy.
Two Newsmax programs on May 9, 2023, hosted by Eric Bolling and Greg Kelly, broadcast images of the incorrect Garcia. The hosts floated the idea that “the shooter was being falsely posed as a white supremacist in order to impugn ‘MAGA.'” Newsmax's reporting incorrectly associated the plaintiff with the prison gang Puro Tango Blast.
“Each of these media outlets recklessly portrayed our client as a neo-Nazi mass murderer, and each of them have shown him nothing but disrespect,” one of Garcia's attorneys wrote on X. “That is something we cannot accept. We will not allow media organizations to falsely accuse an innocent man of being a neo-Nazi mass murderer without being held accountable. We'll see them in court.”
The lawsuit alleges that Fox News Network, LLC failed to issue a retraction within the stipulated 30-day period. “Indeed, no retraction has ever been published. Fox completely disregarded the Plaintiff and never responded.”
Garcia is seeking damages in excess of $1 million. He is being represented by attorneys Mark Bankston and Greg Adler.
Bankston has a formidable track record and doesn't shy away from taking on big-name defendants, as The Huffington Post noted:
Bankston previously represented two Sandy Hook parents who won $45 million in damages against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, after Jones spent years falsely claiming the 2012 school shooting never happened on his Infowars show. Bankston is also currently representing a 22-year-old Jewish man who alleges he was falsely linked to a neo-Nazi brawl by billionaire Elon Musk.
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