After successfully winning a consequential defamation suit against CNN in January, Navy veteran Zachary Young has media-industry publication Puck News in his sights. According to a complaint filed in Bay County, Florida’s 14th Judicial Circuit on Friday, and exclusively obtained by NewsBusters, Young accused left-leaning Puck News, via the reporting of “entertainment law expert” Eriq Gardner, of choosing to “repeat and spread the false claims of CNN.”
The alleged defamation stemmed from Gardner's December 10, 2024 article with Young accusing Puck of uncritically parroting CNN’s defamatory claims as fact (emphasis added to highlight):
Why the deep dive into CNN’s finances? It goes back to a November 11, 2021, segment on The Lead With Jake Tapper, when reporter Alex Marquardt detailed how, following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the government, panicked locals turned to private contractors to help them flee the country. One such contractor was Zachary Young, a Navy veteran whose firm was charging people hefty fees—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars—to escape the Taliban.
The complaint also argued Gardner seemingly tried to downplay the merits of Young case by suggesting there were political forces at work behind the scenes and ignoring CNN’s factual inaccuracies:
On December 10, 2024, Puck wrote that Mr. Young’s lawsuit against CNN “may go places” because of “Ron DeSantis appointees reshaping Florida’s appellate courts, Trump allies positioned at the federal level, and a legal climate growing less hospitable to speech deemed harmful to the national interest.” (emphasis added). The December Article omits CNN’s factual inaccuracies and the devastating internal CNN emails revealed in discovery, to imply that Mr. Young’s claims were frivolous and that he was guilty of what CNN had accused him.
Young scored pre-trial wins on many of the facts of the case days before Gardner published his offending article. As NewsBusters reported on December 8, Judge William Henry ordered: “[I]mportant part of the Court’s prior ruling was that Young did not do anything criminal or illegal.”
Even after a jury of CNN and Young’s peers found the former liable for malicious defamation and awarded Young $5 million (with an undisclosed settlement on punitive damages), the complaint argued Gardner insisted Young’s case didn’t have merit and he only won because of the venue.
According to Gardner: “Late Friday, after a weeklong trial, CNN settled with Zachary Young, the Navy veteran spotlighted in a 2021 exposé on bad actors profiting from aiding Afghans escaping the Taliban… CNN’s real problem was geographical: the trial was set in Panama City, one of Florida’s deepest-red outposts.”
He also suggested the case was just another of instance of “Republican-appointed judges…greenlighting a surge of defamation cases.” “This is intended to convey that Mr. Young’s suit is frivolous or meritless, advanced because of political allies and sympathetic Republican judges. The entire gist of the article is that these types of suits are not credible and are only gaining traction due to politics,” Young said via the complaint.
“Ignoring publicly available and credible evidence while still accepting CNN’s characterization of Mr. Young is an example of deliberately avoiding the truth,” the complaint added. “Puck and Gardner showed willful blindness to that truth by attempting to revive CNN’s already discredited narrative.”
The complain also accused Puck and Gardner of being “a mouthpiece for CNN,” citing how they were apparently privy to “CNN’s trial strategy” well before the trial started:
This information was not yet public knowledge, as the trial had not begun. Gardner had no way of knowing these facts unless he gathered them directly from CNN. And while Gardner was talking to CNN, he never once reached out to Mr. Young.
Gardner also omitted the publicly available excerpts of CNN’s internal messages that showed their actual and expressed malice against Young.
In the filing’s claims for relief, it contends Puck News was liable for defamation per se, defamation by implication, and trade libel. Further, Young “demands a trial by jury on all issues so triable.”
