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July 24, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The left-wing Washington Post has settled a defamation suit against the paper over its misleading and inflammatory coverage of a group of pro-life Catholic teenagers who attended the 2019 March for Life in Washington, D.C.

Immediately after last year’s March, the press erupted with claims that a video showed boys from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky harassing Native American activist Nathan Phillips outside the Lincoln Memorial. But additional extended video and firsthand accounts soon revealed that Phillips was the one who waded into the group waiting for its bus and decided to beat a drum inches from Sandmann’s face, while the boys had merely performed school cheers in hopes of drowning out racist taunts from members of the Black Hebrew Israelites fringe group.

As additional video came to light, many journalists and public figures quickly deleted their snap condemnations of the students. Some, however, either tried to keep the original narrative alive or refused to unequivocally retract or apologize for their initial claims, leading to various lawsuits on behalf of the boys, including a $250 million suit against the Post on behalf of Sandmann, who turned 18 today.

Sandmann and his attorney Lin Wood announced Friday morning that the Post has settled for an as-yet-undisclosed sum:

In January, Sandmann’s attorneys settled a similar lawsuit against CNN. Litigation remains pending against Gannett, ABC, CBS, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and NBCUniversal.

An unrelated series of suits by a different legal team, on behalf of eight other, unnamed Covington students, targets Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Deb Haaland, CNN’s Ana Navarro, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, ABC News’s Matthew Dowd, ex-CNN personalities Kathy Griffin and Reza Aslan, Kentucky entrepreneur Adam Edelen, Princeton University’s Kevin Kruse, left-wing activist Shaun King, Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery, and former Rewire editor-in-chief Jodi Jacobson.

Sandmann’s victory over the Washington Post follows a successful appeal last year of U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman’s decision to toss the suit on the grounds that the paper corrected its initial reporting with an editor’s note. Sandmann’s attorneys responded that the note was little more than damage control, and ultimately insufficient. 

“If [the press] can get away with this against a 16-year-old boy, then we’re all at risk. There has to be change,” Wood argued.