Muslim Comedian Wins $4.1 Million In Lawsuit Against Neo-Nazi Website Owner
Dean Obeidallah Image by Getty Images
A Muslim-American comedian was awarded $4.1 million in a lawsuit against the founder of a neo-Nazi website after the comedian was falsely accused of committing a terrorist attack, Huffpost reported.
SiriusXM Radio show host Dean Obeidallah wrote an article in 2017 criticizing how President Trump was handling white supremacy. After The Daily Stormer website followed up with a piece claiming he was being behind an ISIS attack, Obeidallah sued its founder, Andrew Anglin, for defamation.
The judge ruled that Anglin’s statements weren’t protected under the First Amendment and ordered him to pay $4.1 million in damages.
“The judge apparently found what they did so atrocious he gave them the most he could in punitive damages,” Obeidallah told The Daily Beast.
He said it was never about the money; he’s going to donate it to groups dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, “the very groups Nazis despise.”
Anglin was recently dropped by his attorneys because he’s hiding overseas to avoid a different trial. In 2016, he allegedly encouraged his followers to start an anti-Semitic “troll storm” against a Jewish Montana woman. She sued him a year later.
Alyssa Fisher is a writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
