A Delaware judge has sided with a California family in a preliminary stage of their defamation lawsuit Deadspin, concluding that an article published several years ago that falsely painted a young football fan as racist contained numerous allegations that were demonstrably false.
The article, written by Carron Phillips and published by Deadspin late last year, centered on a series of photographs that showed then 9-year-old Holden Armenta attending a Kansas City Chiefs game in Las Vegas while wearing a Native American headdress and with his face painted red and black, two colors associated with the team.
Phillips said Armenta had “found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time,” and suggested Armenta’s parents “taught” him to be racist and hateful toward minorities.
Armenta’s grandfather, Raul Armenta, Sr., is a member of the board of the Chumash Tribe in Santa Ynez, California. He also served for more than two decades on the tribe’s Gaming Commission, according to a website associated with the organization.
After certain facts came to light, Deadspin amended its article, saying the original story was actually an opinion column based on a single image that appeared to show Armenta wearing blackface. The image showed only the side of Armenta’s face; the other side was painted red.
“Unfortunately the article drew attention to the fan, though our intended focus was on the NFL and its checkered history on race, an issue which our writer has covered extensively for Deadspin,” the editor’s note said.
The note went on to claim that the piece was supposed to spotlight the apparent failings of the National Football League (NFL) for failing to extend its anti-racism rules to fans.
Raul Armenta, Jr. and his wife, Shannon, did not find the explanation satisfying. They filed a lawsuit against Deadspin, accusing the web outlet of defamation. One month after the lawsuit was filed, Deadspin’s parent company G/O Media sold the website to a European publisher, which fired the entire staff.
The lawsuit claimed that the Armentas and their young son were subject to threatening messages after the Deadspin article was published. In one case, a person threatened to kill the child “with a wood chipper,” the lawsuit said.
Deadspin filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing the piece was commentary and thus protected from defamation claims. This week, a Delaware judge overseeing the case rejected that argument, saying the website “crossed the fine line protecting its speech from defamation claims” when it published Armenta’s image “as a backdrop for its critique of the NFL’s diversity efforts.”
“Having reviewed the complaint, the court concludes that Deadspin’s statements accusing H.A. of wearing black face and Native headdress ‘to hate black people and the Native American at the same time,’ and that he was taught this hatred by his parents, are provable false assertions of fact and are therefore actionable,” Judge Sean Lugg wrote in the order, using the initials for the young Armenta, who is referenced the same way throughout the case.
Lugg also said he was unpersuaded by Deadspin’s argument that the case should have been filed in California, where the Armentas live. The case was appropriately filed in Delaware, he concluded, because G/O Media was incorporated there at the time.
“Deadspin and Carron Phillips have never shown a morsel of remorse for using a 9-year-old boy as their political football,” Elizabeth Locke, an attorney representing the Armentas, said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press. “The Armenta family is looking forward to taking depositions and presenting this case to a jury at trial.”
