Nicholas Sandmann was born on July 10, 2002 in Kentucky. He was an unremarkable teenager from the tight-knit, deeply Catholic community of northern Kentucky before January 2019. He was a student at Covington Catholic High School, an all-male school in Park Hills, Kentucky. His background could not have prepared him for what was about to happen when his school arranged a trip to Washington D.C.
On January 18, 2019, two marches, the Indigenous Peoples March, to raise awareness of indigenous issues, and the anti-abortion March for Life, attended by Covington students, occurred on the Plaza of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. A small group from the Indigenous Peoples March overlapped with a larger group of Covington Catholic students, ages 15 and 16, on the Plaza for about ten minutes.
Sandmann had run to the Lincoln Memorial in a panic after losing his friends and his phone dying, but arrived in plenty of time. He saw a group that called itself the Black Hebrew Israelites who started to insult the students, including throwing racial slurs at an African American freshman. This was the tense scene into which Nathan Phillips, a Native American elder and activist, walked into the group beating a drum. Video footage of the run-in showed Sandmann and Phillips mere inches apart with Sandmann staring down Phillips, who was singing and playing a drum, and at times smiling at Phillips.
Clips of a video of the encounter spread virally almost immediately the following day, showing students surrounding Phillips while apparently mocking him. Outrage erupted immediately, especially on social media. Sandmann, who was only 16 at the time, was sporting a red “Make America Great Again” cap and became the face of what many in the media painted as a racist confrontation. Students were threatened with death and Covington Catholic High School closed for a brief period amid fears for the safety of its students.
Sandmann said he saw himself compared to lunch counter protesters during the civil rights movement and watched the edited, very short video of himself on his phone on the bus ride home. He said he was horrified at how what he saw as entirely innocent had been twisted into something “disgusting and ugly”.
Longer recordings of the encounter emerged that gave a fuller picture of how the event played out, including scenes in which the students were mocked by a third group of demonstrators – and ones that appeared to show Phillips had approached Sandmann, not the other way round. Sandmann’s MAGA hat, critics said, had marked him as part of “Team Trump,” and the national shaming he received was thus deserved. This rationale caused many journalists and commentators to double down on their original bad takes even as the fuller story unfolded.
Sandmann said in his own statement that he smiled at Phillips to let him know he wouldn’t get angry, intimidated or provoked into a bigger confrontation and had no ill will toward the man.
Sandmann and his family mounted a sweeping legal strategy, filing massive defamation lawsuits against several of the nation’s most powerful media organizations. His family sued The Washington Post for $250 million, the same amount Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid to purchase the newspaper, seeking $50 million in compensation and $200 million in punitive damages. His suit sought more than $1 billion in damages from The New York Times, ABC, CBS, Rolling Stone and Gannett.
CNN settled for an undisclosed amount, a hearing at the federal courthouse in Covington revealed. Sandmann also settled for undisclosed amounts with The Washington Post in 2020 and NBC News in 2021. These three settlements were generally seen as a substantial if partial vindication.
Sandmann did not win all of his legal battles. He lost lawsuits against The New York Times, CBS, ABC, Rolling Stone and Gannett. In March 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear his petition, upholding the lower court’s dismissal of those remaining lawsuits. The news was announced by Sandmann himself on X, formerly known as Twitter. His attorney, Todd McMurtry, said the ruling was a grave disappointment and that the court’s refusal to hear the case underscores the growing difficulty people face in challenging the unchecked defamation by the mainstream media that threatens their reputational integrity and personal dignity.
Sandmann did not withdraw from public life. He gave a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, telling his side of the incident and saying mainstream media outlets are biased, and was later hired by Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign. He also became a public speaker, discussing his experiences and his ideas on media bias. He continued his education at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Most recently, he served as Press Assistant and Intern Coordinator for the Senate Republican Conference.
The Sandmann case morphed into more than the plight of one teenager. It became a lightning rod in the larger American conversation about media accountability, social media outrage and the dangers of viral clips without context. Sandmann is a cautionary tale for his supporters of a politically biased rush to judgment. For others, the episode is a window into how complicated and fraught the intersection of race, religion and politics remains in America. What is not in dispute is that a few minutes on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial changed the life of a teenager who, he says, was just waiting for a bus home.
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