https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-chucks-20b-racial-discrimination-lawsuit-against-comcast_3283273.html
Supreme Court Rejects $20 Billion Racial Discrimination Lawsuit Against Comcast
(remember POTUS called comcast evil)
The Supreme Court unanimously rejected a $20 billion civil rights lawsuit filed against Comcast Corp. by a black television programmer who was angry that the cable service refused to carry his company’s channels, in a series of rulings issued on March 23.
At the same time, in separate rulings, the court also upheld Kansas’s abolition of the insanity defense and found North Carolina couldn’t be sued for copyright infringement.
In Comcast Corp. v. National Association of African American-Owned Media, Comcast had declined to do business with Los Angeles-based Entertainment Studios Networks (ESN), which is owned by black entrepreneur and comedian Byron Allen. Comcast said there was “insufficient consumer demand” for ESN’s programs.
Allen’s company, which is also suing Charter Communications Inc., retorted that Comcast has carried a multitude of white-owned networks, offered multiple different excuses, and made comments he construed as racial in nature.
Allen sued, claiming race-based discrimination under federal civil rights laws. The case was dismissed early in the litigation process—it has never reached the evidentiary discovery stage or gone to trial. A panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found the allegations raised against the company plausible enough to move forward and reinstated the action. Comcast appealed and the Supreme Court agreed June 10, 2019, to hear the appeal. The Trump administration supported Comcast’s position.
The Supreme Court held that a civil rights law adopted in 1866 that is known as Section 1981 requires plaintiffs to claim in lawsuits that they would have received a contract “but for” racial bias, a strict standard the court has used in other contexts. But the 9th Circuit had allowed the lawsuit to proceed under a more lax standard, that treated race as a mere “motivating factor,” instead of as the sole cause.
Section 1981 “follows the usual rules, not any exception,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the court’s opinion. “To prevail, a plaintiff must initially plead and ultimately prove that, but for race, it would not have suffered the loss of a legally protected right.”
The case was sent back to lower courts for reconsideration under the stricter standard.