A Florida jury found that CNN liable of defaming Navy veteran Zachary Young on Friday, and awarded him a total of $5 million in addition to finding that punitive damages were warranted against the network.

The verdict follows other high-stakes media defamation cases against Fox News, which agreed to pay $787 million to Dominion voting systems, and ABC, which agreed to give $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential library.

In his lawsuit against the cable news network, Young sought damages over a November 2021 report in which CNN chief national security correspondent Alex Marquardt claimed that bad actors were reportedly running a black market and charging exorbitant fees to Afghans attempting to flee their country after the Taliban retook control of it earlier that year.

Segments about Marquardt’s report ran on both Jake Tapper and Jim Acosta’s shows. Young’s name and face featured in both segments; he was the only individual identified by Marquardt.

Young’s legal team has submitted that CNN published “lies” about his business extracting people from Afghanistan and cited internal communications — which revealed that employees had doubts about the integrity of Marquardt’s story, as well as that Marquardt had called Young a “mf*****” whom he hoped to “nail” and agreed with a producer that the veteran had a “punchable face” — as evidence that the aim of of the story was to “hurt” him.

“Clients and colleagues in the national security community simply cannot associate with anyone involved in ‘black markets’ or ‘exploitation,’” argued Young in his lawsuit. “Thus, despite their falsity, CNN’s defamatory comments have rendered Young permanently unemployable in the career he has trained his whole life for, have resulted in Young’s income plunging to nothing, and have caused Young to suffer millions of dollars in lost income.”

CNN has defended itself by arguing that part of the report were opinion, rather than assertions of fact, and by declaring 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.”

At closing arguments on Thursday, CNN lead counsel David Axelrod (not the Democratic political strategist and CNN commentator) asked jurors whether Young’s team had proved there was a “conspiracy” or CNN had been “trying to do their best.”

Meanwhile, Devin Freedman, a lawyer for Young, argued that “Zach’s ability to walk into a room with pride and being seen as a professional with integrity has been stripped away.”

“These are injuries that transcend monetary loss. They pierce the soul of who he is, who he was,” added Freedman.

The trial is now set to move on to phase two, during which the figure CNN owes in punitive damages will be determined.

The post BREAKING: Florida Jury Finds CNN Defamed Navy Veteran, Awards Him Millions in Damages first appeared on Mediaite.

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