’2000 Mules’ maker settles defamation case with Gwinnett man on eve of trial
Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza has settled a defamation lawsuit filed by a Gwinnett County man in 2022, avoiding a trial that was set to begin Monday in federal court in Atlanta.
The settlement, details of which were not disclosed, ends a yearslong legal battle for Mark Andrews, an auditor from Gwinnett, falsely portrayed in the movie “2000 Mules” as a “ballot mule.”
The suit centered on a seconds-long clip of surveillance video featured in the documentary showing Andrews returning absentee ballots for himself and four family members at a drop box before the 2020 election.
“What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes,” D’Souza said in a voice-over in the documentary.
State investigators cleared Andrews, confirming he indeed was legally returning ballots for family members. D’Souza later acknowledged he was wrong and apologized to Andrews.
The movie made more than $9 million, according to an order from U.S. District Judge Steven Grimberg. The movie premiered at Mar-a-Lago and had drawn praise from then-former President Donald Trump and a cadre of conservative activists. The documentary became a high-profile example that conservatives pointed to as evidence that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.
The film spread the theory that 2,000 people in five states, including Georgia, collected and delivered multiple absentee ballots, a practice critics called “ballot harvesting.” It relied on surveillance footage from drop-box sites that was matched with geolocated cellphone data that appeared to show repeated trips to locations near drop boxes.
Conservative activist group True the Vote analyzed cellphone location signals near drop boxes, though it was later disclosed in court documents that the cellphone signals didn’t match the footage shown in the movie.
Despite Trump insisting the 2020 election was stolen from him, multiple recounts, investigations and court cases have dismissed such claims as baseless.
Attorneys for D’Souza and True the Vote blamed each other in federal court last year. While D’Souza’s attorneys said that True the Vote’s research had misled D’Souza into believing Andrews was a “ballot mule,” True the Vote said it cannot be held accountable for what D’Souza said in the documentary. True the Vote was removed as a defendant in the lawsuit in November, according to court records.
Catherine Engelbrecht, the co-founder of True the Vote, and her colleague, Gregg Phillips, made a series of appearances on right wing media where images and footage of Andrews were played, including on the “Charlie Kirk Show” and Fox News. Phillips, a former high-ranking official in the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency who once claimed to have teleported to Waffle House, described the footage of Andrews as an “egregious” ballot stuffing on the right wing news outlet The Gateway Pundit in 2022.
Lawyers for Andrews did not respond to a request for comment Monday. An attorney for D’Souza declined to comment.