Shirley Sherrod, the presidential appointee ousted last summer amid controversy over video of her making apparently racial statements, has sued conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.
Sherrod was forced from her job as U.S. Agriculture Department's rural development director for Georgia after the footage from an NAACP banquet was posted on Breitbart's website, biggovernment.com. In it, she seemed to be admitting to discriminating against a white farmer while doing her job two decades earlier.
Reporting at the time by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed that her comments were taken out of context in the edited video.
The complaint was filed Friday in the District of Columbia Superior Court.
Reached by phone Monday, Sherrod declined to discuss the lawsuit but her attorney, Thomas Clare, released a statement.
“This lawsuit is not about politics or race,” Sherrod said in the statement. “It is not about right versus left, the NAACP, or the tea party. It is about how quickly, in today’s Internet media environment, a person’s good name can become ‘collateral damage’ in an overheated political debate."
After the context of her comments became clear, Sherrod was offered another job in the Agriculture Department, which she declined.
"I'm not employed and no one's offered me a job anywhere, so I don't know where to look at this point," she told the Associate Press on Monday. "I'm just trying to survive."
Breitbart was served the subpoena Saturday during the Conservative Political Action Conference being held over the weekend in Washington, D.C., according to The New York Times.
“I find it extremely telling that this lawsuit was brought almost seven months after the alleged incidents that caused a national media frenzy occurred," Breitbart said in a statement Saturday. He promised he would be fully vindicated.
Also named in the lawsuit are Larry O'Connor, the head of Breitbart.tv, and a anonymous defendant -- called "John Doe" -- who is said to have edited the video.
Sherrod is demanding that the court order the video and accompanying blog be removed from Breitbart's website and that a video produced by O'Connor be pulled from YouTube.com. The lawsuit also seeks an unspecified amount in compensatory and punitive damages for sullying Sherrod's reputation, humiliating her and costing her the job and $113,000 federal salary.
The video in question appeared to depict Sherrod suggesting to members of the NAACP that she used her authority to deny federal agricultural loan assistance to a south Georgia farmer because he was white.
Accompanying the video was Breitbart's blog, alleging that "this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions."
The ensuing flap prompted NAACP President Benjamin Jealous to publicly renounce Sherrod, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to call for her ouster.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the two-minute, 38-second video had been edited, omitting Sherrod's admission of how the incident nearly two decades earlier had led to her change of heart on racial matters.
The unedited video, which was taped before the Obama Administration tapped her to head development from the USDA's Georgia office, revealed that by overcoming her own prejudices, Sherrod helped the white farmer, Rodger Spooner, save his farm.
The White House and Jealous formally apologized to Sherrod. Vilsack offered his mea culpa, along with a new job in the department.
The Associate Press contributed to this story.
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