CNN found liable for $5 million in defamation trial against US Navy vet over ‘black market’ Afghanistan story

A Florida jury found CNN liable on Friday in a high-stakes defamation trial against U.S. Navy veteran Zachary Young, who alleged that the network maligned him as an “illegal profiteer” with a report on Afghan evacuees being charged thousands of dollars to flee the country following the U.S. military withdrawal.

Following two days of deliberations, the jury ruled that CNN must pay Young $4 million in financial damages and $1 million for emotional damage, adding that Young is also owed punitive damages. After the trial entered a second phase to determine punitive damages, the network eventually settled with Young for an undisclosed amount.

“We remain proud of our journalists and are 100% committed to strong, fearless and fair-minded reporting at CNN, though we will of course take what useful lessons we can from this case,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement after the settlement was announced.

Once both sides had moved to argue their case for how much additional money Young should be awarded, Judge William Henry told the jurors on Friday that during this second phase, the punitive damages against CNN could only apply to its actions in this specific case and not on any other stories or issues. Following an extended break in the testimony, during which the two legal teams engaged in discussion, Henry informed the jury that the two sides had settled.

One juror asked Henry if they could “have the privilege to know the settlement amount,” only for the judge to look towards both legal teams before responding: “Apparently not.”

Though the amount was not disclosed, the settlement came after a business expert for the plaintiff testified that, based on his review of CNN’s earnings, he estimated that CNN brought in roughly $150 million of revenue a month. He further suggested that it could be a fair amount to pay in punitive damages.

“The numbers represent the Plaintiff’s interpretation of a subset of data as presented in litigation, and they do not represent financial data for the whole of CNN’s business,” a CNN spokesperson told The Independent.

The verdict comes weeks after ABC News paid $15 million to Donald Trump’s presidential library fund and another million dollars to his legal team to settle the president-elect’s defamation lawsuit against the network – a move that First Amendment experts warned could have a “chilling effect” on the free press.

The jury in the trial, which was held in deeply conservative Bay County, Florida, was tasked with determining whether CNN acted with “actual malice” during its reporting on Young. The court defines actual malice as a reckless disregard of the truth while publishing false information. Additionally, the burden of proof in this case was lower because the judge ruled before the trial that Young was not a public figure.

Young, a security contractor who once worked for the CIA, sued CNN in 2022 over a story it ran the year before on private contractors charging desperate Afghans large amounts of money to help evacuate them from the war-torn country after the Taliban retook control. The investigatory piece, reported by national security correspondent Alex Marquardt, was first aired on Jake Tapper’s show and warned of “exorbitant fees” from “black market” rescue operations that had “no guarantee of safety or success.” Young was the only contractor named throughout the story.

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In his complaint, Young said his inclusion in the story suggested that his activities were criminal, specifically because of an on-air graphic that used the term “black market.” That banner was also used when the story ran on CNN programming and the network’s website. Young said that he only charged corporate sponsors to extract Afghans and never took money directly from residents, pushing back on the story’s implication that he was exploiting people fearful of the Taliban.

CNN’s legal team and witnesses, meanwhile, argued during the trial that their intention behind the use of the term “black market” was to show that evacuations in the region were taking place in an “unregulated market” and didn’t explicitly mean the actions were criminal. Young’s attorneys, however, noted that the dictionary defined the term as “illegal.”

“Do not let CNN rewrite the English language to avoid liability in this case,” attorney Devin Freedman told the jurors during his closing arguments on Thursday.

Young has argued that the CNN story destroyed his reputation and left him unable to make a living, claiming his yearly salary went from six figures to zero. He also said that the network caused psychological damage to him, prompting Freedman to urge the jury to “send a message that news organizations must be held accountable.”

Months after the story first ran on CNN, the network issued an on-air apology after Young’s attorneys threatened legal action. Delivered by anchor Pamela Brown, who was substituting for Tapper, the correction stated that the term “black market” shouldn’t have been used in the report and the network “did not intend to suggest that Mr. Young participated in a black market.”

During the trial, however, Marquardt and other CNN employees testified that they didn’t feel the correction was necessary and that it was merely issued at the behest of the network’s legal counsel to avoid a lawsuit.

Additionally, CNN’s legal team argued in court filings that at the “time of its reporting, CNN knew little about Young’s financials, his model, or whether he’d successfully evacuated anyone because whenever anyone [including CNN] asked Young to explain his business, he obfuscated, behaved unprofessionally, lied, and hid.” They also stated last summer that Young’s “operation was very different from how he publicly portrayed it” and he never planned any evacuations.

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“I reported the facts. I reported what I found. Everything in there was factual, accurate and, I believe, fair,” Marquardt said on the stand on Monday, defending his reporting. He also took issue with his story being described as a “hit piece” by Young’s lawyers, claiming he wasn’t personally going after the security contractor.

“You needed a bad guy for your scandal story,” Freedman told Marquardt at one point. “You hated him, did you not?”

Throughout the trial, Freedman presented a series of Slack messages and emails from Marquardt and other CNN staffers in which they referred to Young as a “s***bag” with a “punchable face.” In one message to an editor, Marquardt said they were “gonna nail this Zachary Young mf***er,” while an editor responded: “Gonna hold you to that one cowboy!” In another message, Marquardt said of Young: “It’s your funeral, bucko.”

In depositions and court filings, CNN and its lawyers defended the harsh remarks as “banter” that’s part of a candid newsroom and that it didn’t impact the editorial process. “I hear a lot of profanity at work,” one producer said. “Few things are more common in newsrooms than journalists using tough and indignant language to refer to persons whose misdeeds they believe they are in the process of exposing,” the network acknowledged in a filing last month.

In a December court order, though, Judge William Henry stated that while the network “downplays the ‘coarse and harsh language’” as “journalistic bravado,” a “reasonable jury could find with convincing clarity that the reporters acted with ill will, hostility or an evil intention to defame and injure Young or intended to personally harm him.”

The jury may have tipped its hand on Wednesday when they repeatedly peppered CNN reporter Katie Bo Lillis — who first attempted to contact Young for the story — with pointed questions about the vague messages she initially sent the contractor. “Do you feel Americans are obligated to speak to you?” one juror asked, while another wondered: “At what point do you accept someone not wishing to speak or comment?”

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Additionally, network lawyer David Axelrod (no relation to the CNN pundit of the same name) was severely reprimanded by Henry on Wednesday for “blatant misrepresentations” he made about a document related to Young. Saying Axelrod’s credibility with him was “none,” Henry urged the lawyer to apologize to Young for repeatedly calling him a “liar.”

The network’s editorial process and fact-checking also came under intense scrutiny during the trial, especially since some editors seemed to express reservations about publishing the story. “The story is full of holes like Swiss cheese,” breaking news editor Megan Trimble wrote, while senior national security editor Thomas Lumley replied: “Agree. The story is 80% emotion, 20% obscured fact lol.”

“I’m never going to publish a story that is factually incorrect or unfair,” Lumley said on Tuesday, insisting that he didn’t doubt the facts of the story. “That’s the red line.”

The trial took part in the Florida Panhandle, a deeply red part of the country that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. It also comes at a time when CNN, which the president-elect has repeatedly called “fake news,” and the rest of the mainstream media face ideologically polarized perceptions from the public. Conservative discontent has only grown more engrained as Trump has made legal and political threats against the press a regular occurrence.

Perhaps because of this, some legal observers called on CNN to settle before the case went to trial, especially in light of the “damning” text exchanges that had become public during discovery.

“The internal communications certainly make it sound as if the main journalist on the story wanted to ruin the plaintiff, and that there were reasons to believe that ... he was overplaying their hand factually,” University of Florida law professor Lyrissa Lidsky told NPR earlier this month.

“My advice to CNN would be to cough it up. Settle,” former Bloomberg News media legal counsel Charles Glasser added. “Admit you’re wrong. Admit your hyperbole was out of line, and move on.”