Rumble Files Federal Defamation Lawsuit Against Co-Founders of Purported Watchdog Group
LONGBOAT KEY, Fla., Nov. 29, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 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. 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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