‘Napping guy’ at baseball game files $10 million lawsuit against ESPN for mocked on live TV

10 years ago | Posted in: Laws | 1048 Views

ESPN chiefs will be waking up to a law suit of $10 million this morning after a man that was filmed falling asleep during a baseball game decided to sue the sports broadcaster.

Andrew Rector has decided to file a multi-million pound defamation suit against ESPN claiming that commentators Dan Shulman and John Kruk had launched an “unending verbal tirade” against him as he slept through the Major League Baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

The lawsuit filed by Rector, claims that Kruk and Shulman unleashed an “avalanche of disparaging words” and that they had made “false statements” suggesting he was “not worthy” to be a Yankees fan and was “a fatty cow that need two seats at all time and represent symbol of failure.”

The video that was put on the Major League Baseball website the next day does not appear to show the two commentators saying the aforementioned comments, but it does see them asking questions like whether the fan was there alone or if he had slept through the earlier home run of Yankees’ hitter Carlos Beltran’s home run.

Rector said that the comments from the two commentators had led to him suffering “substantial injury” to his “character and reputation,” as well as “mental anguish, loss of future income and loss of earning capacity.”

According to the New York Post, the suit, which was filed on June 3, was full of bad grammar, and even included a number of typos.

Rector has yet to be reached for comment; however, his mum has spoken out calling Kruk and Shulman “idiots” that “need to not make fun of people who are harmless.”

Rector’s lawyer, Valentine Okwara, has said only, “We’ll settle this in court.”

In a statement by ESPN they refuted the claims and said: “The comments attributed to ESPN and our announcers were clearly not said in our telecast. The claims presented here are wholly without merit.”

source: Independent UK

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