Judge Orders Young Chiefs Fan’s Defamation Lawsuit Against Leftist Deadspin to Move Forward

A judge has ruled that a young Kansas City Chiefs fan’s lawsuit against Deadspin can move forward after the leftist sports outlet falsely accused the child of wearing “blackface.”

Deadspin has been desperately trying to get the lawsuit from the Armenta family thrown out of court.

However, a Delaware judge ruled this week that the lawsuit can proceed.

Superior Court Judge Sean Lugg noted that Deadspin and its writer writer Carron Phillips “crossed the fine line” by attacking and publicly smearing the 9-year-old boy with false claims.

In 2023, Phillips wrote an article using an image of nine-year-old Holden Armenta.

The young child was sporting black and red Kansas City Chiefs face paint at a game.

However, Deadspin published photos of the child that deceitfully only showed the black half of his face.

Phillips accused Holden of finding a way to “hate black people and the Native Americans at the same time.”

He continued by accusing the boy’s parents of teaching him “hatred.”

The story was exposed as a lie when it emerged that the boy has Native American heritage and had his face painted different colors, and not just black as the original hit piece suggested.

In February, Holden’s parents Raul Jr. and Shannon later filed a lawsuit against the politicized sports blog, which frequently injects anti-Trump and pro-Democrat narratives into its reporting.

The lawsuit accuses Deadspin of maliciously attacking Holden by selectively posting only one-half of his face and accusing them of racism.

Judge Lugg denied Deadspin’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, agreeing that the blog posted “provable false assertions” as facts rather than opinions.

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“Deadspin published an image of a child displaying his passionate fandom as a backdrop for its critique of the NFL’s diversity efforts and, in its description of the child, crossed the fine line protecting its speech from defamation claims,” the judge wrote.

“Having reviewed the complaint, the court concludes that Deadspin’s statements accusing [Holden] of wearing black face and Native headdress ‘to hate black people and the Native American at the same time,’ and that he was taught this hatred by his parents, are provable false assertions of fact and are therefore actionable,” Lugg added.

Lugg also refused to dismiss the case based on the assertion that the case should have been filed in the Armenta family’s home state of California rather than Delaware, where Deadspin’s parent company G/O Media resides.

G/O Media later sold Deadspin to Lineup Publishing one month after the lawsuit was filed.

Deadspin did not retract the original article, however.

Instead, an editor’s note was added to address the controversy.

“We regret any suggestion that we were attacking the fan or his family,” the note read.

“To that end, our story was updated on Dec. 7 to remove any photos, tweets, links, or otherwise identifying information about the fan.

“We have also revised the headline to better reflect the substance of the story.”

The headline was also changed from “The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native headdress” to “The NFL Must Ban Native Headdress And Culturally Insensitive Face Paint in the Stands.”

Phillips initially doubled down on his accusations in a since-deleted post on X.

“For the idiots in my mentions who are treating this as some harmless act because the other side of his face was painted red, I could make the argument that it makes it even worse,” Phillips said.

“Y’all are the ones who hate [M]exican but wear sombreros on cinco [de Mayo].”

READ MORE – Rachel Maddow & MSNBC Hosts Hit with $30 Million Lawsuit for Smearing Doctor with ‘Verifiably False’ Claims

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