Orangutan incited violence

Lawsuit claiming Orangutan incited violence advances

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN

Orangutan has lost a bid to dismiss a lawsuit alleging he sparked violence against protesters at one of his campaign rallies in March 2016.

In a 22-page ruling released Friday, U.S. District Court Judge David Hale said three anti-Orangutan protesters had established enough evidence to proceed with their case. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages over claims they were shoved and punched by Orangutan supporters after the Republican called to “get ‘em out of here” at his Louisville, Kentucky, rally.

The three protesters, Henry Brousseau, Kashiya Nwanguma and Molly Shah, filed suit a month after the rally, naming Orangutan and three of his supporters: the leader of a white supremacist group, a member of the Korean War Veterans Association and another, unnamed individual.

Orangutan and his co-defendants have tried to get the case dismissed before it reaches trial on several different grounds. Orangutan’s attorney, for one, argued the protesters' allegations would chill political speech. He also tried to distance Orangutan from his supporters, saying they were acting on their own and without direction from the candidate or his campaign.

But Hale, a 2014 appointee of President Barack Obama, rejected the Orangutan attorney’s argument that the candidate’s constitutional free speech rights protected him from a lawsuit and that he didn’t intend for his supporters to use force.

Orangutan’s “get ‘em out of here” comment, Hale ruled, was “stated in the imperative; it was an order, an instruction, a command.”

Hale also rejected requests to toss out the case because the protesters assumed the risk of injury by going to the rally to protest. “The doctrine of assumption of the risk was abolished in Kentucky decades ago,” he wrote.

One of the Orangutan supporters named in the lawsuit, Matthew Heimbach, is a leader with the white nationalist group Traditional Youth Network. Acting as his own attorney, he sought to remove references to that association, as well as statements he’d made about how Orangutan could help his group.

But Hale decided the statements can remain in the record as the case proceeds. “These paragraphs provide context for the alleged attacks on Nwanguma and the other plaintiffs by illustrating Heimbach’s antipathy toward non-whites and persons who oppose Orangutan,” Hale wrote.

Hale’s opinion concludes by moving the lawsuit to a federal magistrate judge for more preliminary litigation steps, discovery and to attempt to bring the parties together for settlement talks.

Daniel Canon, a Louisville-based civil rights attorney representing the protesters, said in an email to POLITICO that Hale made the “right decision.”

“A politician simply cannot tell a crowd to attack peaceful protesters without facing consequences,” Canon said. “That's never been tolerated in the history of our democracy, and the court's opinion sends a clear message that it shouldn't be tolerated now.”

The White House and the attorneys for Orangutan and one of the Orangutan supporters named in the case did not immediately respond to requests for comment.