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As right-wing troll Chuck Johnson pumped out dubious stories on his website Got News throughout 2017 and 2018, visitors to the site were bombarded with pleas for donations to keep the operation afloat.
“The lion’s share of the funds required to run this website comes from donations,” declared a caption on the right side of the page, accompanied by a PayPal link and a bitcoin donation QR code. “Please support independent journalism.”
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It turns out that wasn’t actually true. Documents filed as part of bankruptcy proceedings in California, prompted by a federal defamation lawsuit against Johnson and his company, reveal that Got News brought in next to nothing in revenue in 2017 and 2018, and instead relied on large loans from two of Johnson’s other companies.
According to bankruptcy filings, Got News brought in just $9,290 in revenue in 2017, and $1,412 the year after, when it ceased publishing in April. During those years, Johnson’s other companies, CCJ Strategies LLC and Freestartr LLC, loaned the company $378,210, according to the filings.
Those numbers underscore the limited commercial appeal of Johnson’s brand of alt-right bomb-throwing. That brand has earned him some high-profile allies, and he has scored meetings over the last few years with Republican members of Congress (one of whom invited him to the 2018 State of the Union address) and even a Trump Cabinet official.
But it appears that few readers were willing to pony up to directly support Got News’ reporting work.
That work, such as it was, is what has landed Johnson’s company in federal bankruptcy court. He and Got News are both named as defendants in a federal lawsuit alleging that they defamed a man by falsely linking him to the murder of a counterprotester at the white-supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
According to Got News bankruptcy filings, the plaintiff in that lawsuit is seeking $800,000 in damages.
“As far as I am concerned, if your news site makes a mistake like that, perhaps it deserves to die,” Johnson wrote in a statement that attributed the error to a one-time Got News contributor. “I believe that their lawsuit was never about them thinking they should get rich. I believe that they thought it was about making a point. Well, there is no better way to make that point than killing the media outlet that hurt you.”
“I would remind my critics that I won my own suit against Gawker media and that while GotNews is bankrupted, Charles Johnson is very much not,” he continued. “I will have many businesses in this life and some of them won’t survive. Oh well.”
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