CNN Slapped With $37M Defamation Lawsuit By J6 Protester
Charged only with 'parading' the network claimed he wanted to 'start a revolution'

Jacob Hiles took a trip to Washington DC that changed his life forever.
We all know what happened that day, in the sense of what happened generally. But you probably don’t know Jacob’s story.
He went to the Capitol. He followed the crowd in. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of ‘parading’ and took 60 hours of community service.
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But with the way he was treated in the media, he probably would have paid less of a price if he’d been caught torching a police car the summer before that.
You may be familiar with the social media selfie caption that was popular at the time: ‘Was feeling cute. May delete it later’. Hiles was riffing off of that template when he captioned his selfie ‘feeling cute, might start a revolution later’.
We remind our readers, at no point was Hiles implicated in anything beyond the misdemeanor parading charge. No evidence of a clash with police, or of damaging property came up. It was strictly a wrong-place wrong-time infraction.
That’s not how CNN portrayed it.
His lawsuit alleges CNN defamed him in an article published on October 15, 2021, with the headline: “US Capitol Police officer indicted on obstruction of justice charges in connection with January 6.”
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The article’s focus later shifts to Hiles, with a subheading that says: “Man wanted to start ‘a revolution’ on January 6.”
According to the lawsuit, that subheading and the article’s contents are defamatory because “they falsely accuse Hiles of felonious criminal activity of which he was not charged or convicted, either directly or indirectly.”
The lawsuit alleges that the article accuses Hiles of having “the intention to overthrow a sitting government which is one of the gravest felonies in the United States of America even though at the time of publication he had been charged with four Class B misdemeanors and entered a guilty plea to only one nonviolent misdemeanor and resulting in the three other charges being dismissed.”
The lawsuit claims the article has harmed Hiles and his reputation, and seeks $37 million in compensatory damages and a further $350,000 in punitive damages. —Newsweek
The suffering he alleges in the suit includes numerous credible death threats, business losses, and fallout from the allegation that his daughter has endured at school.