In a Friday filing with Florida’s 14th Judicial Circuit in Bay County, Navy veteran Zachary Young filed a defamation suit against the Associated Press for making similar claims against him which led to CNN being found liable for malicious defamation. The complaint pointed out that the AP used similar rhetoric against Young that they used for criminal conduct and that they refused to publish “any retraction or correction.”
According to the filing, exclusively obtained by NewsBusters, “AP blatantly accused Mr. Young of engaging in criminal human smuggling” [emphasis added in the document].
The filing argues that the AP’s reporting falsely suggested that Young was committing a felony under United States federal law:
In its article, AP published the defamatory statement, with actual malice, that Mr. Young’s business “helped smuggle people out of Afghanistan”. This statement is categorically false. At the time of publication, AP knew or recklessly disregarded that a Florida court had already ruled Plaintiff committed no crime in connection with the Afghanistan evacuations. Mr. Young never “smuggled” anyone.
Describing Mr. Young’s lifesaving evacuations as “smuggling” is not only grossly misleading, it charges Mr. Young with a serious crime. Human smuggling is a grave felony under U.S. law (8 U.S.C. § 1324), and it is condemned as a serious crime under international law (the U.N. Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants). By accusing Mr. Young of human smuggling, AP effectively branded him a criminal.
“AP has used the term “smuggling” in dozens of prior articles to describe plainly criminal conduct such as human trafficking, drug operations, and transnational crime,” the filing added.
Similarly with Young’s defamation suit against Puck News, reports using terms asserting that Young was engaged in illegal activity (while helping to rescue almost two dozen women and baby from Afghanistan) were lies as a matter of law.
Prior to the beginning of his trial against CNN, Young scored wins on many of the facts of the case long before the AP published their offending article. As NewsBusters reported on December 8, 2024, Judge William Henry ordered: “[I]mportant part of the Court’s prior ruling was that Young did not do anything criminal or illegal.”
Young pointed to AP’s article on the results of the CNN trial as the offending report. In that article, the AP wrote [emphasis added in the document]: “Young’s business helped smuggle people out of Afghanistan, but he said he worked exclusively with deep-pocketed outside sponsors like Bloomberg and Audible.”
The filing stated:
The clear takeaway from AP’s wording is that Mr. Young smuggled people out of Afghanistan – i.e. engaged in the crime of human smuggling – even if he didn’t charge those people directly. The statement is written as a fact, and it is absolutely false.
AP’s assertion is, in essence, that Mr. Young’s evacuation work was an illegal smuggling operation bankrolled by wealthy sponsors. This statement about Mr. Young and Nemex is false, defamatory, and extremely damaging.
In a Facebook post from February 6 2019, the AP Stylebook wrote this about human smuggling: “Human smuggling or people smuggling typically involves transporting people across an international border illegally, with their consent, in exchange for a fee.”
Further, the complaint noted that the AP had full access to the facts since they were following the trial and thus were aware that “The jury’s verdict against CNN confirmed that Mr. Young was falsely portrayed as doing something unlawful.”
“AP had obvious reasons to doubt the truth of its statement (given the CNN verdict and the information available from that case), yet it published the accusation anyway. No one from AP reached out to Mr. Young for comment or clarification before publishing the “smuggling people” charge,” the filing continued.
The complaint presented three counts against the AP: defamation per se, defamation by implication, and trade libel. Young was requesting a “trial by jury” for damages “to be determined.”
