Washington Football Team owner Daniel Snyder has filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against a media company that indicated his name was on a list of sexual offenders maintained by Jeffrey Epstein in a story it published prior to The Washington Post dropping its bombshell report about sexual harassment within Snyder’s organization.
In a lawsuit filed Friday in New Delhi coupled with federal court papers in California, the 55-year-old alleges the owners of the Media Entertainment Arts WorldWide website (meaww.com) accepted payment in exchange for publishing defamatory rumors about what was in The Post‘s report. Snyder also wants to know who was handing out the checks.
According to the lawsuit, the website’s India-based parent company allowed publication of stories “it knew were false and designed to malign him, some using information from anonymous posts on social news sites including Reddit,” The New York Times writes.
“While Mr. Snyder understands that truthful criticism about the Washington Football Team comes with the territory of owning the team, malicious criminal allegations cross the line,” Snyder’s lawyer, Rizwan A. Qureshi, said in a statement. “He intends to hold all of those responsible for this defamation accountable, and will donate any proceeds recovered in the lawsuit to charity.”
First reported by TMZ, the suit also alleges the website posted an article hinting The Post’s story was going to expose that Snyder was accused of being involved in sex trafficking and also posted this ridiculous theory: “Will Dan Snyder rename Washington Redskins the ‘Epsteins?’”
The stories have been removed from the website and one of its founders, Nirnay Chowdhary, said “errors” were made in the stories about Snyder, but the company denies it took money to deliberately spread fake news.
“My entire company has been harassed,” Chowdhary told The Times. “They started asking us, ‘Who had paid you to write these articles? If you are not going to tell us the name, we are going to file a lawsuit.’ They are trying to force us to give us some name of someone but we have no name to give to them. This person doesn’t not exist.”
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