From the Complaint filed today in Armenta v. G/O Media Inc. (Del. Super. Ct.):
Nine-year-old H.A. loves the Kansas City Chiefs—and he loves his family's Chumash-Indian heritage. On November 26, 2023, H.A. displayed that love by attending the Chiefs-Raiders NFL football game wearing a Chiefs jersey and necklace, his face painted half-red and half-black, and a costume headdress— just as Chiefs fans and other avid sports fans have done for decades.
During the CBS television broadcast, H.A. was shown for three seconds, where the audience can clearly see his red-and-black face paint. Immediately thereafter, CBS panned to a Raiders fan in black-and-white face paint. Together, they represented fervent fans with their faces painted for game-day battle, each wearing their team's respective colors and costume garb ….
Those few seconds provided just the opportunity for Deadspin Senior Writer Carron Phillips to, on behalf of himself and his employer Deadspin, maliciously and wantonly attack a nine-year-old boy and his parents for Phillips' own race-drenched political agenda. By selectively capturing from the CBS broadcast an image of H.A. showing only the one side of his face with black paint on it—an effort that took laser-focused precision to accomplish given how quickly the boy appeared on screen—Phillips and Deadspin deliberately omitted the half of H.A.'s face with red paint on it.
Armed with this misleadingly-edited photo, Phillips wrote an article, published by Deadspin, entitled "The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native headdress" ("the Article").
The Article falsely alleged that H.A. had "found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time." It alleged that H.A.'s parents, Shannon and Raul, "taught" H.A. "racism and hate" at home. It intentionally painted a picture of the Armenta Family as anti-Black, anti-Native American bigots who proudly engaged in the worst kind of racist conduct motivated by their family's hatred for Black and Native Americans.
