Lawfare Against The Press: A North Carolina Case That Should Concern Everyone Who Values Free Speech

Guest Post by The American Rights Alliance

When powerful people dislike what is written about them, they have two ways to respond. They can answer in the public square, with facts, rebuttals, and counter-speech. Or they can answer in a courtroom, where the contest is decided not only by who is right, but by who can afford to keep fighting. A pair of defamation lawsuits now pending in North Carolina shows what happens when influential figures choose the courthouse, and it is precisely the kind of case the American Rights Alliance exists to scrutinize.

Noel Fritsch, publisher of the news website National File, has been named as a defendant in two separate defamation actions arising from a December 2025 article. The reporting addressed allegations involving public figures and referenced an audio recording that was already circulating on social media before the North Carolina Republican primary.

The first suit was filed by Jennifer Karpowicz Bland, a North Carolina attorney named in the reporting. A second followed from Judge Jerry Tillett, who also named additional defendants connected to the dissemination of the recording. In both cases, the plaintiffs seek not only money damages, but court orders compelling the removal of the articles and barring any similar publication in the future.

That last demand deserves emphasis. These plaintiffs are not merely asking to be compensated for harm they claim to have suffered. They are asking a court to take material down and to prohibit future speech on the subject, a prior restraint that strikes at the core of what the First Amendment protects.

Fritsch disputes the lawsuits entirely. He maintains that his reporting concerned matters of legitimate public concern, that it relied on information already in the public sphere, and that the underlying recording was lawfully obtained, pointing to his claim that local authorities identified the voice and that investigators found no illegality in how the audio was acquired. He has characterized the suits as politically motivated efforts to punish and silence his coverage, and he has not retracted his reporting.

YOU CAN HELP NOEL’S LEGAL DEFENSE HERE

The American Rights Alliance takes no position on the truth of the competing factual claims, and we do not adopt the sharp personal characterizations Fritsch has leveled at the plaintiffs. No court has ruled on the merits, no findings of liability exist, and the parties dispute nearly everything about the recording’s origin and authenticity.

What concerns us is not who ultimately prevails on the facts. It is the machinery being used to fight, and what that machinery does to free expression, long before any verdict is reached.

Because this reporting involves public figures, an attorney, and a sitting judge, and matters of public concern, the plaintiffs face a demanding burden. Under New York Times v. Sullivan and the decades of precedent built on it, a public figure cannot win a defamation claim merely by showing a statement was false and damaging. They must prove “actual malice”, that the publisher acted with knowledge that the statement was false, or with reckless disregard for whether it was true.

That high bar exists for a reason. The Supreme Court understood that if every unflattering report about a public official could trigger ruinous liability, journalists would simply stop reporting on the powerful. Robust, sometimes mistaken, sometimes caustic coverage of public officials is not a flaw in the system; it is the system working as the Founders intended.

Here is what too few people acknowledge: the actual malice standard, however demanding on paper, does not protect a journalist from the cost of being sued. And the cost is the point. A defamation suit against an independent outlet does not have to win to succeed. It only has to be expensive. Even a frivolous claim can take months or years to defeat, consume tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and hang over a small publisher’s head the entire time.

A plaintiff with money to spend can impose that burden at will. A reporter without it faces a brutal choice: retract, settle, or be bled dry defending speech that may well be fully protected. This is the inconvenient reality that the phrase “you can have your day in court” obscures. Our legal system, for all its virtues, does not distribute the ability to litigate equally.

It rewards the party that can afford to keep the fight going. In disputes between a well-resourced plaintiff and an independent journalist, the merits can become almost beside the point, because the process itself is the punishment, and the threat of that process is often enough to make critical coverage disappear before a judge ever weighs in.

That is not a free press in any meaningful sense. A right you cannot afford to exercise is not much of a right at all. The chilling effect is the goal.

Skip to PDF content

Lawsuits of this kind do not only target the named defendant. They send a message to every other reporter, blogger, and small outlet watching: cover powerful people aggressively, and you may be next. The chilling effect radiates outward. Stories go unwritten. Tips go unpursued. Editors quietly decide a subject is “not worth the legal exposure.” The public never learns what it was not allowed to read.

This is why the American Rights Alliance regards the rising use of defamation litigation against independent media as one of the most serious free-speech threats of our era. As reporting increasingly bypasses traditional gatekeepers, those who once relied on friendly coverage or buried stories have found a new lever: the courts. The goal is frequently not vindication. It is deterrence.

TO HELP NOEL’S LEGAL DEFENSE CLICK HERE

The remedy is not to weaken defamation law for the genuinely defamed. People do have a right to their reputations, and reckless falsehoods cause real harm. The remedy is to make sure that defending protected speech does not require a fortune.

Strong anti-SLAPP laws, statutes that let courts quickly dismiss meritless suits brought to silence speech on public matters, and shift legal fees to the plaintiff who filed them, are the most direct fix. They restore the balance the cost of litigation destroys, by making it expensive to file a censorship suit rather than expensive to defend against one. Where these protections are weak or absent, the courthouse remains open as a weapon. Where they are strong, free expression has room to breathe.

We’re getting sued. AGAIN!

Last time, it was “Senator Hitler,” Mark Kelly, from Arizona.

This time, it’s another Democrat, Jerry Tillett, a guy with a scandal of his own, reported here at National File.

We need your help!

Please chip in to our legal defense fund! pic.twitter.com/BLX3ZTrjs6

— National File (@NationalFile) June 17, 2026

The American Rights Alliance does not endorse any candidate, party, or the contents of any particular article. We defend a principle: that Americans, including independent journalists who report on judges, prosecutors, and politically connected figures, must be free to speak on matters of public concern without being financially destroyed for it.

Both cases remain pending. All claims are allegations only, and no findings of liability have been made. Readers are encouraged to review the original reporting and the public filings and to judge the underlying claims for themselves. But whatever a court eventually decides about the facts, the broader stakes are already clear. When litigation becomes a tool to silence rather than to seek justice, the loss belongs to all of us, because the speech that gets chilled is never only the speech of the person being sued.

HELP NOEL’S LEGAL DEFENSE HERE

The post Lawfare Against The Press: A North Carolina Case That Should Concern Everyone Who Values Free Speech appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.