After the very controversial video surfaced of the Covington Catholic students and Nathan Phillips’ encounter at the capital while the students waited for their bus. To sum up the video, what is seen is a large group of the all boys school is seen standing around the Native American (Nathan Phillips) banging on his drum. This video was met with a lot of scrutiny saying the boys were being disrespectful to Nathan Phillips, but there seems to be more to the video than meets the eye.

In the foreground of the video we see Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann simply staring motionless at the face of Nathan, which he says was out of respect.

Now to the lawsuit. The reason Nicholas and his family are seeking damages are because according to their lawyer is, that CNN portrayed Nicholas as a bad and evil person, which in turn led people to release his name to the public allowing them to find his social media and to personally berate and bully him for this video that was taken out of context. There was also a massive social media backlash and according to his lawyer they took a snippet of the video and put it out on twitter and slandered his name and the school without getting the full story.

His attorneys are suing CNN $75M for compensatory damages and $200M for punitive damages. His team has already sued the Washington Post for a huge sum of money and they plan to continue suing news stations and individuals. His attorney stated, “We plan to file a suit every few weeks of month, we probably have ten top targets in the media and individuals.”