US governor candidate Mark Robinson sues CNN over porn forum claims

North Carolina’s Robinson denies report he wrote racially and sexually explicit posts and called himself a ‘black Nazi’.

North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson has moved to sue CNN, contesting the US network’s claims that he posted obscene sexual and racial comments on a pornography site.

Robinson announced the lawsuit at a press conference on Tuesday, slamming the news organisation’s reporting as a “high-tech lynching”.

The suit comes less than a month after CNN published a report detailing the explicit internet posts allegedly made by Robinson, who is the Republican candidate in the race to become North Carolina’s next governor.

According to CNN, Robinson left statements on the message board of a pornography website called “Nude Africa”, in which he, in part, described himself as a “black NAZI”, said that he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama, and slammed the assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr as “worse than a maggot”.

The allegations pushed many Republican officials and candidates, including US presidential nominee Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson, who now trails his Democratic opponent in the polls by double digits.