Journalist Yashar Ali is suing Los Angeles Magazine for defamation one year after the outlet published a 6,000-word profile about him called “The Curious Rise of Twitter Power Broker Yashar Ali.” Ali is best known for his large Twitter following of more than 750,000 and for contributing to HuffPost, NBC News and New York magazine. In the suit, Ali alleges that the story didn’t have a fact-checker—which he said was customary for a piece that long—and he wasn’t given a fair chance to respond to the allegations, the Los Angeles Times reported. Journalist Parker Molloy wrote a follow-up article Tuesday in which editor Maer Roshan insisted the “article was rigorously fact-checked and legally vetted, and by prior agreement with Yashar, every quote of his that appeared in the story was approved by him,” Roshan said. According to the suit, the feature also suggests that Ali became suicidal during the fact-checking process, which “falsely implies that [Ali] acknowledged the truth of the supposed revelations in the article and was distraught that the public was going to learn the supposed truth about him.” A spokesperson for LA Magazine told the Times Friday that it was unaware of the lawsuit.
