Inset: Zachary Young. Main: A court exhibit highlights the chyron from the Nov. 11, 2021, CNN segment at issue (court documents).
CNN‘s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery must conduct a financial deep dive and then hand relevant information over to a Navy veteran who is suing the network in a high-profile, and potentially high-dollar, defamation case, a judge in Delaware ruled on Friday.
In the event the requested documents do not exist, however, the company must issue a “sworn declaration” to that effect, Delaware Superior Court Judge Lynne M. Parker ruled, Fox News reports.
The ruling may come as something of a double-edged victory for Zachary Young, who is suing CNN over a 2021 segment that aired on “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” In the lawsuit, Young claims the cable news channel falsely painted him as an “illegal profiteer” exploiting “desperate Afghans” with “exorbitant” extraction fees amid the fallout of President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Young and his attorneys have been trying to get their hands on certain financial documents they claim are relevant to the case for some time but complain that CNN has not been forthcoming with such discovery.
The underlying lawsuit was filed in Bay County, Florida, where 14th Judicial Circuit Court Judge William Henry is overseeing the case.
Young, a U.S. citizen who lives in Austria and is the president of Florida-based corporation Nemex Enterprises, is suing for CNN defamation per se, defamation by implication, group libel and trade libel, claiming that his efforts to save lives in Afghanistan as a security consultant were distorted by “lies published for sensationalism.”
The segment at issue, which aired on Nov. 11, 2021, and featured correspondent Alex Marquardt’s reporting on Tapper’s show, displayed a photo of Young over chyrons that read: “AFGHANS TRYING TO FLEE TALIBAN FACE BLACK MARKETS, EXORBITANT FEES, NO GUARANTEE OF SAFETY OR SUCCESS” and “AFGHANS AND ACTIVISTS REPORT DEMANDS OF $10K-$14K FOR ATTEMPTS TO GET FAMILY MEMBERS OUT OF COUNTRY.”
CNN has since tried and failed to prevent Young from amending his lawsuit to request likely costly punitive damages, failed to keep Tapper from being deposed, failed to prevent the release of embarrassing internal messages, and, relevant now, failed to keep the trial court from signing off on an “expansive” financial spelunking trip.
But the multinational mass media conglomerate, for their part, says the documents Young wants simply do not exist.
“If it doesn’t exist, we can’t be compelled to produce anything,” Jennifer Ying, representing Warner Bros. Discovery, told the judge in Delaware, according to a courtroom report by Fox News.
“We have told them twice now that such information does not exist,” Ying reportedly continued. “They have refused to accept that. We cannot create information that simply does not exist.”
Henry previously issued an order directing CNN to turn over the requested documents — but threw up his hands at the suggestion of directing the network to issue a sworn declaration attesting to the would-be non-existence of the financial statements in question.
The Florida court’s broad ruling, while helpful to the plaintiff, ultimately created a state of limbo in a fast-approaching trial.
Tired of waiting, the plaintiff’s team recently moved up the corporate organization chart — filing a request with the Delaware court because that is where Warner Bros. Discovery is incorporated.
“It’s simply inconceivable that Warner Bros. Discovery is incapable of providing cashflow and balance sheet information for its wholly owned subsidiary,” attorney Joe Delich told Parker. “Warner Bros. Discovery has produced some documents but has not produced any information about cashflow, or any kind of balance sheet information. We know that Warner Bros. Discovery has the ability to do this.”
On Friday, the parent company’s attorney shot back that the latest ask from Young was “premature” because the original subpoena return date had yet to lapse. Ying also complained that the subpoena lacked any mention of cash flow statements and balance sheets.
Parker aimed to cut through the confusion — unintentional or otherwise; essentially instructing both parties to get it together.
She told Young to issue a new, more specific subpoena that explicitly demands both cash flow statements and balance sheets.
“Well, CNN does not have to provide a sworn declaration, but Warner Bros. does,” the Delaware judge said. “You’re going to subpoena Warner Brothers requesting these two specific things, and they’re either going to produce documents or they’re going to give you a sworn declaration that it does not exist.”
The court instructed Young’s team to act fast.
“Issue the subpoena right away,” Parker continued. “They have 20 days from the date of issuance to respond.”
In the underlying lawsuit, Young says he “never advertised to, or took a single penny from, any Afghan, much less ‘exploited’ ‘desperate Afghans,”” that he “certainly never sold any services on a ‘black market,’” and that “[e]verything he did was legal.” But the CNN report “rendered” him “permanently unemployable in the career he has trained his whole life for” and, in turn, cost him millions of dollars.
The complaint includes an on-air correction and apology where CNN says they did not “mean to suggest” Young “participated in the black market,” despite the chyron under his photo on the segment.
The court docket in Florida currently shows two pre-trial hearings scheduled for Nov. 25 and 26. Trial is slated to begin Jan. 6.
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