[IRYzouNv]

LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...,3818088.story

Shirley Sherrod has filed a defamation suit against Andrew Breitbart, the conservative gadfly she alleges triggered her firing by the Obama administration and ignited a national debate on race and reverse discrimination.

Sherrod was the Georgia director for rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture until last June, when Breitbart posted online a heavily edited video excerpt of her speaking to a Georgia civil-rights group in which Sherrod, an African American woman, suggested that she once discriminated against a white farmer seeking help.

The resulting tumult led the USDA to ask for Sherrod's resignation. But once the entire video was made public, it became clear that Sherrod was talking about overcoming her own racial prejudices.

...

As a result of Breitbart's actions, the complaint says, Sherrod has suffered "enduring damage to her reputation, as well as emotional distress and financial damages from her loss of employment at USDA."

The lawsuit does not request a specific award and seeks punitive damages. It also requests that Brietbart and his company remove all "defamatory language and video" from his blog at BigGovernment.com -- as well as from YouTube.

[Aminkaoo]

TPM: http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmem...od.php?ref=fpa

When TPM asked Andrew Breitbart last July if the release of an edited video of Shirley Sherrod was timed to impact a Senate vote on restitution for black farmers, he said no. Now that she's suing him for defamation, he's making that restitution the issue.

Sherrod made good on her threat to sue Breitbart over the video in a complaint filed in D.C. Superior Court on Friday. The lawsuit alleges that Breitbart was "angered by the NAACP's claims of racism against the Tea Party" and used Sherrod "to further his own agenda of counter-attacking the NAACP with claims of racism." It further states that the video ignited a "media firestorm" and resulted in her forced resignation from the USDA -- before the truth came out and prompted apologies from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

But the response to the defamation suit posted on Breitbart's Big Government website makes no mention of the edited video, the NAACP or the Tea Party. And it does not refer to Sherrod by name. Instead, the news release alludes to her as "a central figure in the Pigford 'back-door' reparations case," and frames Pigford as the central issue in the lawsuit.

The Pigford settlements paid black farmers who said they had been discriminated against by the USDA in the 1980s and 1990s. (The Pigford II settlement, worth $1.25 billion, was signed by Obama in December.) Sherrod and her husband, a civil rights activist, received a multi-million-dollar settlement as part of the first settlement.