EXCLUSIVE: Parents of slain DNC staffer Seth Rich speak out about their lawsuit against Fox News over bogus story about their son. @TomLlamasABC has the story pic.twitter.com/HshSmyQ4C5
Joel and Mary Rich are speaking out after suing Fox News over the coverage of their son, the murdered DNC staffer, Seth Rich.
“I want the people who started the lies, who are responsible for the lies, held accountable. This has got to stop,” Mary Rich told Good Morning America on Thursday. “They never called us to check any facts. They took a rumor and ran with it.”
“We lost his body the first time and the second we lost his soul,” she added. “They took more from us with a lie.”
Rich, who was killed in July 2016 in Washington D.C. after what police say was a botched robbery, became a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists who said that he had been the source of DNC emails obtained and released by Wikileaks. If true, it would have destroyed the prevailing narrative that the emails were delivered to Wikileaks by way of Russian hackers.
Fox News and Sean Hannity dedicated significant coverage to the story — which ultimately turned out to be untrue.
The network issued a broad retraction of its Seth Rich coverage in May 2017.
On Tuesday, the Rich family filed suit against Fox News as well as reporter Malia Zimmerman and guest contributor Ed Butowsky.
“Joel and Mary Rich, grieving parents of a murdered child, seek justice for having become collateral damage in a political war to which they are innocent bystanders,” reads the suit. “Joel and Mary bring this case to hold Fox News, Fox reporter Zimmerman, and Fox News contributor and political operative Butowsky accountable. They seek to help prevent similar malicious and reckless conduct to protect future innocent victims from similarly becoming political fodder.”
Fox News has consistently declined to comment on the litigation, only telling TheWrap that Butowsky was not a “contributor” as labeled in the suit.
Rich’s parents told “Good Morning America” that they never received an apology from Fox over the false reporting.
Fox News' Jesse Watters: His 10 Most Offensive Moments (Videos)
Shortly after O'Reilly was ousted from Fox News, Watters took his own vacation from the network after coming under fire for making a comment about First Daughter Ivanka Trump, which some interpreted as inappropriate sexual innuendo.
Watters' recurring segment on "The O'Reilly Factor" involved sending the host out to various events and locations across the country for man-on-the-street style interviews that mock various cultural subgroups in their own communities. In a 2016 segment, Watters went after Italian Americans at the Feast of San Gennaro festival.
One of Watters' most controversial segments came in the form of a 2016 venture into New York's Chinatown. In the heavily criticized piece, Watters turned his signature schtick on Chinese Americans, resulting in a blatantly racist segment that played on Asian stereotypes and openly mocked its subjects.
Watters' October 2016 venture to the Amish community in Pennsylvania was turned into one recurring punchline -- over the fact that the Amish don't vote or pay much attention to presidential politics. "Lucky you," he tells several people.
In 2007, O'Reilly sent Watters to ambush Bill Moyers in the street after the PBS host released a documentary criticizing the Bush administration for the Iraq War. Bill O'Reilly would later go on to call that segment a contributing factor in Moyers' decision to retire.
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
In 2015, Watters went to Penn Station to criticize the "rise of homelessness" in New York City, pointedly asking those sleeping at the station about their drug habits and what they did to make money on the streets.
On the anniversary of 9/11, Watters went to a convention for Muslim Americans to ask them about terrorism and Islamic radicals. When a woman criticized the media for linking terrorism to the Islamic religion, Watters and O'Reilly both balked at the suggestion that "Christian terrorism" could even exist.
In 2009, Amanda Terkel, then the managing editor of Think Progress, wrote a column in which she said she was "followed, harassed, and ambushed" by Watters while on vacation after she ran a column criticizing Bill O'Reilly for his comments toward rape survivors.
Watters was caught on video getting into a fight at the 2016 White House Correspondents' Dinner afterparty with The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim. It was later reported that Grim approached Watters with a camera asking him to apologize to Terkel for his behavior in 2009.
O'Reilly sent Watters to Philadelphia for a tone-deaf segment about racism in which he mocked the Black Lives Matter movement, criticized political correctness and generally failed to elevate the conversation surrounding race relations in America.
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Shortly after O'Reilly was ousted from Fox News, Watters took his own vacation from the network after coming under fire for making a comment about First Daughter Ivanka Trump, which some interpreted as inappropriate sexual innuendo.
