Nick Sandmann, who at the time was a Covington Catholic student, appears in a screengrab taken from a video filed as an exhibit in federal court.
In an orders list on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up Nick Sandmann’s case against the New York Times, CBS, ABC, Rolling Stone, and Gannett, bringing an end to his libel lawsuits against the media for its coverage of his encounter with Native American activist Nathan Phillips at the March for Life in Washington, D.C., back in 2019.
After Sandmann filed his petition for a writ of certiorari in January, the media organizations the next month each waived the right to respond, the Supreme Court’s docket shows.
In the petition, Sandmann’s lawyers maintained that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was wrong to conclude media who reported Phillips’ account that Sandmann had “blocked [his] way and wouldn’t allow [him] to retreat” had published statements that were “protected opinions.”
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Referring to Sandmann as an “innocent high school student” at the time of the incident and a subsequent victim of “cancel culture,” the attorneys argued that statements about Sandmann’s movements that day were “loaded with defamatory implications,” as saying that a “white teenager from a private Catholic school wearing a red MAGA hat was physically blocking the progress of a peaceful Native American protestor carried unmistakable connotations of racism, intolerance, intimidation, and insensitivity.”