Lawyers for Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann came out swinging Monday, deriding the editor’s note added to the Washington Post’s initial coverage of Sandmann’s January encounter with a Native American elder in Washington, D.C., as “grossly insufficient.”
“The Friday night efforts by the Post to whitewash its wrongdoing were untimely, grossly insufficient and did little more than perpetuate the lies it published — lies that will haunt and adversely impact Nicholas for the rest of his life,” attorneys L. Lin Wood and Todd McMurtry said in a statement published online.
“The Post ignored its own culpability and wrongdoing,” they continued, adding that the paper “did not have the character to apologize to Nicholas and seek his forgiveness.”
Wood declined to comment beyond the statement, but told TheWrap that his team planned to move forward with the $250 million lawsuit filed against the Post last month.
Reps for the Post declined to comment beyond an earlier statement from last week.
“While we do not accept the characterizations and contentions regarding our reporting of the incident at the Lincoln Memorial, we have taken steps to address the concerns expressed to us. The full story did not emerge all at once and throughout our coverage, we sought to produce accurate reports,” a rep for the paper said.
On Friday, the Washington Post issued a lengthy editor’s note in regards to their Covington coverage which offered no apology and was not posted to the website’s homepage.
“A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial,” the note read in part. “Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story — including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict.”
Last month, Sandmann sued the Post for defamation over its coverage of the encounter between him and Nathan Phillips. The Post ran “no less than six false and defamatory articles” about the matter, the suit reads, adding that the paper “wrongfully targeted and bullied Nicholas because he was the white, Catholic student wearing a red ‘Make America Great Again’ souvenir cap.”