Rumble Files Federal Defamation Lawsuit Against Co-Founders of Purported Watchdog Group
November 29 2023 - 9:10AM
Rumble, the video-sharing platform and cloud services provider
(NASDAQ: RUM), filed a lawsuit today in federal court in Florida
against two co-founders of a purported watchdog organization.
Rumble sued Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, co-founders of Check My
Ads, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation that routinely targets news
outlets and platforms that do not adhere to their political
worldview. Also named as defendants are John Does – numbers 1
through 10 – as yet-to-be-identified individuals who helped prepare
and publish the defamatory information on their website.
Rumble is represented by the law firm of Clare Locke LLP, which
is among the foremost defamation and First Amendment litigators in
the United States.
“As an unapologetically free-speech platform, Rumble’s mission
is to provide all content creators and users a place to speak,
listen, and debate freely, regardless of their political
perspective. When anti-free speech zealots, whose self-declared
mission is to shut Rumble down, lie to inflict intentional economic
harm on our company, we have no choice but to hold them
accountable,” said Rumble Chairman and CEO Chris Pavlovski.
“Defamation is not free speech. We have filed this lawsuit because
we have a responsibility to our shareholders, creators, users, and
advertisers to act, and not sit idly by, when someone attacks our
company’s reputation solely to silence differing political views.
Our mission requires it.”
Jammi has a track record of launching pressure campaigns against
advertisers on other outlets, including Fox News and Breitbart, and
has worked with Media Matters, the hyper-partisan organization that
also attempts to hound advertisers to stop spending on outlets that
support the free exchange of ideas.
The lawsuit alleges that Jammi and Atkin cannot tolerate
Rumble’s content-neutral philosophy and want competing points of
view to be silenced.
As cited in the suit, the defendants accused Rumble of lying to
its shareholders and the Securities and Exchange Commission about
the company’s financial health and the source of its revenue.
“Defendants have repeatedly peddled the false narrative that
Rumble is primarily monetized by and wholly dependent upon revenue
from Google Ads, when in reality, Google Ads now represents less
than 1% of the Company’s revenue,” the suit states. “This narrative
is particularly damaging to Rumble. The notion that Rumble is
heavily dependent on ad revenue from Google is wholly inconsistent
with Rumble’s publicly stated mission to be free from the political
and economic pressures of Big Tech. And it is equally damaging to
Rumble because it falsely attributes a material and existential
financial risk to the Company that Defendants’ stated mission to
eliminate Rumble’s Google Ad revenue will cause Rumble’s financial
collapse.”
The suit also points out that the defendants knew their claim
about Rumble’s reliance on Google Ad revenue for survival was
false, and the defendants refused to correct their statements when
Rumble demanded a retraction.
In the suit, Rumble is seeking actual, presumed, and punitive
damages, in addition to all costs and fees associated with the
case. Rumble has asked the court to prohibit the defendants from
repeating their false statements and for any other remedies deemed
appropriate.
The lawsuit closely follows one filed by X against Media
Matters. Truth Social, another social media company, similarly has
sued twenty media outlets.“The irony is that the defendants piously
claim to be in the business of protecting all of us from
disinformation, but they are the ones lying to the public,”
Pavlovski said. “This lawsuit opens up another front in the ongoing
war against censorship, much like X’s recently filed suit against
Media Matters—another entity that tries to shut down dissent
online—and Truth Social’s lawsuit against 20 media outlets. For
those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of
ideas, it is important to stand up to bullies—and people who lie
and use intimidation tactics are most assuredly bullies, just as
they are enemies of free speech.”
ABOUT RUMBLE
Rumble is a high-growth video platform and cloud services
provider that is creating the rails and independent infrastructure
designed to be immune to cancel culture. Rumble’s mission is to
restore the Internet to its roots by making it free and open once
again. For more information, visit: corp.rumble.com.
Rumble recently publicized new user demographic data, which
showed that users of the platform are politically diverse, contrary
to what some critics may believe. According to data compiled by
Comscore, 35.5 percent of Rumble users self-identify as Democrats,
28.9 percent as Independents, and 21.8 percent as Republicans.
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Contact: press@rumble.com
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