Dinesh D’Souza Defames, Gets D’Sued. DOH!

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes! You would think Dinesh D’Souza would have learned this lesson after participating in the dumbest straw man donor scheme ever and winding up with a felony conviction for it. But you would be wrong! In fact, D’Souza has collected so many stupid prizes after squatting and popping out his 2000 Mules book and movie, an offering so rancid and blatantly false that even Fox and Newsmax wouldn’t let him float it in their punch bowls. Even conservative publisher Regnery had to fish it out and subject it to an extensive polishing, pulping the manuscript on the eve of publication to remove ALL THE LIBELSLANDERS.

But this week D’Souza and his pals at True the Vote, the organization behind the claim that there were teams of “mules” who “trafficked” in ballots to steal the 2020 election, got a very special prize — and it wasn’t the usual sadomasochistic thrill of getting pantsed by Wonkette’s own Evan Hurst. Nope, this time it’s a big fat defamation lawsuit filed by a man who cast ballots legally for his family at a polling station in Georgia only to find footage of himself featured prominently in D’Souza’s mockumentary:

Plaintiff [Mark] Andrews is among the voters that Defendants accuse of illegally depositing ballots into drop boxes. As Mr. Andrews appears on screen, during the film, Defendant D’Souza’s voiceover falsely states: “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.” Defendants also feature Mr. Andrews in the trailer for the film.

In fact, the video of Mr. Andrews shows him legally dropping off
ballots for himself and his family, a voting method expressly authorized by
Georgia law. Indeed, a law enforcement investigation—commenced in response to a complaint inspired by Defendants’ false narrative—determined that he had
committed no wrongdoing.

D’Souza and True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, who are also named defendants, routinely promoted their film using a clip of Mark Andrews, who lives with his wife and three adult children and legally dropped off ballots for the family of five at a drop box in Gwinnett County on October 6, 2020. Sometimes they blurred the picture of Andrews’s face and his car, and sometimes they didn’t.

On April 8, 2022, Engelbrecht and Phillips appeared on “The Charlie Kirk Show” and aired the clip twice unblurred, referring to Andrews as “a mule” and describing his conduct as “illegal.” And Engelbrecht played it again on May 5, showing Tucker Carlson’s millions of viewers the plaintiff’s face and license plate.

In point of fact, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations received a complaint on April 25, 2022, from an “activist” who saw the clip and used stills of Andrews’s face and car to identify him. Andrews, a tech executive in his sixties, avers that “as a Black man who grew up in the American South before passage of the Voting Rights Act, Mr. Andrews deeply cherishes the right to vote, has always been proud to cast his ballot, and has worked tirelessly to instill these same values in his family.” On May 17, the Georgia State Elections Board publicly cleared him of all wrongdoing at an open meeting which was also live-streamed. Nevertheless, the defendants did nothing to change their behavior, releasing the film prominently featuring footage of Andrews just three days later.

On May 21, 2022, D’Souza played the clip of Andrews on OANN’s “Weekly Briefing With Chanel Rion.” During the interview, he connected Andrews, who is Black, with antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Out of 240 mules, 242 mules in Atlanta, something like 67 of them were in the violent antifa BLM riots. It doesn’t look to me like that’s likely to be a population of cops, it’s more likely that the Democrats, who by the way dominate these inner cities, basically went to these antifa BLM guys and said: “Look you’ve had enough fun burning cities and pulling people out of their cars and beating them up, why don’t we pay you to do a different kind of operation that might help our guys to get to the White House.”

Predictably, the publicity generated waves of online threats and harassment, and so these assholes find themselves on the pointy end of a lawsuit alleging the state torts of defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and invasion of privacy by appropriation of likeness, as well as violations of the Ku Klux Klan and Voting Rights Acts. As Andrews notes, “Defendants’ ongoing defamation campaign is a modern and particularly insidious method of voter intimidation.”

“At all times, Defendants knew that their portrayals of Mr. Andrews were lies, as was the entire narrative of 2000 Mules. But they have continued to peddle these lies in order to enrich themselves,” the plaintiff writes. “As of the filing of this lawsuit, Defendants’ social media accounts and website still promote the film using Mr. Andrews as an example of a criminal ‘mule.’”

Andrews says that he and his family live in fear, that they’ve faced harassment and death threats, and that “because of Defendants’ conspiracy to defame and intimidate Mr. Andrews, he will never again be able to vote without looking over his shoulder.”

And so, while it’s fun to LOL at circus clowns like D’Souza and Rudy Giuliani, with their facially nonsensical claims about election fraud, let’s not lose sight of the real, human cost of their bullshit. Because like Wandrea’ Arshaye “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby “Lady Ruby” Freeman, election workers who found themselves featured in a conspiracy flogged by Trump and his allies about suitcases of fraudulent ballots, Andrews did his civic duty, and found himself in the middle of rightwing whirlwind. This shit ruins people’s lives — and that’s not fucking funny.

[Andrews v. D’Souza]

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