A Michigan judge declined on Friday to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against CBS by the brother of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty pageant queen who was killed in 1996.
Burke Ramsey, who was nine years old at the time of his sister’s death, filed a $750 million lawsuit in December 2016 over the two-part CBS documentary series “The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey,” claiming the docu-series falsely implicates him in his sister’s slaying. The series aired in September 2016, reaching an audience of 10.4 million people on its first broadcast night and 8.24 million on its second, according to the suit.
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JonBenét Ramsey was found strangled and beaten in the basement of her family’s Boulder, Colorado home on Dec. 26, 1996. James A. Kolar, an investigator in the killing and one of the defendants in the suit, said in the program that Ramsey may have struck his sister out of anger.
The Boulder County District Attorney’s Office said in a 1999 statement that Burke Ramsey was not a suspect in the case and had never been considered a suspect. The case remains unsolved.
The suit, filed against Critical Content — the company that produced the program — its parent company CBS Corporation and six individuals involved with the program, asked for $250 million in compensatory damages and $500 million in punitive damages.
“CBS perpetrated a fraud upon the public,” the suit reads, “instead of being a documentary based on a new investigation by a so-called team of experts, ‘The Case of: JonBenet Ramsey’ was a fictional crime show based primarily on a preconceived storyline based on a self-published and commercially unsuccessful book, ‘Foreign Faction,’ written by defendant James Kolar.”
Kolar’s book lists a number of scenarios in which members of the Ramsey family may have been involved in the girl’s death.
Credit: Barry Williams/Getty Images
Credit: Barry Williams/Getty Images
The CBS Corporation filed a motion in March to have the case dismissed, arguing the series never directly stated that Ramsey killed his sister. In its motion to dismiss, the network also cited a disclaimer that aired before and after the series, which stated, “The opinions and conclusions of the investigators who appear on this program about how it may have occurred represent just some of a number of possible scenarios.”
In a statement issued Wednesday, CBS commented on the judge’s decision, saying, “This very preliminary procedural ruling was issued prior to any evidence being presented. It is based solely on the plaintiff’s complaint. Should the case move forward, we look forward to defending it on its merits.”
Michigan's 3rd Circuit Court judge David Groner declined to dismiss the case on the grounds that, "the statements at issue and the docu-series as a whole could reasonably be understood as stating actual facts."
“This Court does not find that the ‘disclaimer’ at the beginning and at the end of the program negate the docu-series potentially defamatory meaning,” Groner wrote.
This suit is one of many filed by the Ramsey family against members of the media. Burke Ramsey has a separate suit against forensic pathologist Werner U. Spitz, which alleges that Spitz said in a 2016 interview with CBS Detroit radio that JonBenét was “killed by her brother during some sort of late night confrontation.”
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