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Ventura Wins ‘American Sniper’ Defamation Case July 29, 2014, MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO/AP) — A jury in a St. Paul federal court decided in favor of Jesse Ventura in his defamation trial Tuesday afternoon, according to WCCO’s Pat Kessler.
Ventura was awarded $1.3 million for unjust enrichment, and $500,000 in damages for defamation. On the sixth day of deliberations, the federal jury decided that the 2012 best-selling book defamed Ventura in its description of a bar fight in California in 2006.
Kyle wrote that he decked a man whom he later identified as Ventura after the man allegedly said the Navy SEALs “deserve to lose a few.”
Ventura testified that Kyle fabricated the passage about punching him. Kyle said in testimony videotaped before his death last year that his story was accurate.
originally posted by: signalfire
So are all the Ventura haters going to apologize now?
Are all the people who thought Chris Kyle was a 'hero' instead of a serial prevaricator going to rethink their hero worship habits?
(Best part of the trial was when all of Kyle's 'witnesses' who were all utterly sodden at the time, tried independently to place where the altercation took place; each one said a different part of the bar, the patio or the sidewalk outside. The 'best' witness had had more than 15 drinks by his own admission.) So much for the somber wake scenario.
And the vehemence of the Ventura haters to this and hundreds of other threads on other forums shows just how much JV was harmed by this lie. Chris Kyle was in the habit of exaggerating and making things up all the time; it was just this time, there was a camera on him, it went viral, and then he doubled down rather than manning up and retracting what he knew was untrue. This is the kind of person our government gives medals (and rifles) to.
As far as who pays the award, it's not the 'poor widow and children' (already multimillionaires from both the book and movie deals) but the insurance policy for the publisher who should have vetted their facts a bit better. All it would have taken was a question to the Corona Police Department about the night in question and whether a report was filed. Ten minutes of research would have proven Kyle's allegations were untrue and that JV was telling the truth from the very beginning.