Woman sues Project Veritas over portrayal of assault outside Trump rally

A North Carolina woman has filed a lawsuit against the right-wing organization Project Veritas and its founder James O’Keefe over the organization’s portrayal of events surrounding her 2016 assault outside a Trump rally. 

Shirley Teter, 71, sued O’Keefe and Veritas, for what her attorneys called as setting up a private person for “ridicule, contempt, or disgrace,” according to the Associated Press.

{mosads}The organization is best known for attempting to reveal purported liberal bias.

Jurors were sequestered ahead of testimony on Tuesday, according to the AP. 

Teter was assaulted while protesting outside a Trump rally in September 2016. Following the assault, Project Veritas Action Fund posted a video online that it claimed showed Democratic activists plotting to cause violence at Trump rallies, according to the wire service. 

Teter’s lawyers said in court that Democratic activist Scott Foval in the video discussed plans to place people at events so they could question Trump in front of reporters, according to the AP.

The lawyers claimed that the video, and another about Teter, left out Foval informing interviewers that the assault on Teter “was not preplanned” and “we haven’t paid a single person to get beat up at a rally.”

“We stand by our reporting in the video that is the subject of this defamation lawsuit,” O’Keefe said in a statement posted to Project Veritas’s website. “We accurately reported what a high-level political operative told us on videotape. We did not alter the meaning of his statements, and we preserved the video recording in its original state.”

“This trial is nothing more than an attack on the media by people who are ideologically opposed to what we do,” he added. 

Attorneys defending Project Veritas claimed that it “had no intent to defame” Teter, but that “she used that altercation to advocate against Trump in the media and with activist organizations,” the AP reported. 

Teter is seeking monetary damages for her injures and to penalize Project Veritas, according to the AP. Her attorneys characterized the organization as having “a business model that uses deception to produce highly publicized content, without fear of the consequences” and said this showed “reckless disregard for the truth.”