It takes a sick deranged media seeking person to sue a widow. Update to this story.
It would take 11 witnesses and a decorated Navy SEAL lying under oath for Jesse Ventura’s defamation claims against Chris Kyle to hold up, defense attorneys said Tuesday.
Ventura’s lawyers argued that the accounts of those witnesses were so full of holes and inconsistencies that it’s not hard to see how they got it wrong. Deciding the case in the former Minnesota governor’s favor, they said, would help make things right.
The two sides made their closing arguments Tuesday in federal court in St. Paul before handing off the two-week-long trial to a jury of six men and four women.
Jurors got the case about noon and broke for the day just before 4:30 p.m. without reaching a verdict. They’ll resume deliberations Wednesday morning.
The verdict must be unanimous.
At issue is whether Kyle, a SEAL sniper-turned-author, fabricated a story that he punched out Ventura at a Coronado, Calif., bar in 2006.
Kyle wrote in his 2012 bestseller “American Sniper” that he slugged a celebrity he dubbed “Scruff Face” at the bar after the man badmouthed fallen soldiers at a war hero’s wake.
Ventura, who was at the bar for a reunion of his own Navy class, said that never happened. He sued Kyle after he was outed as “Scruff Face” in promotional interviews for the book and continued the lawsuit against Kyle’s estate after Kyle was shot to death at a Texas gun range last year.
Jurors were instructed to focus their deliberations on whether Ventura made offensive statements — that he hated America, that SEALs were killing innocent people in Iraq and that they deserved to lose men at war.
For Ventura to win, the jury must find three things: that the story was defamatory, that it was false and that Kyle knew it was false or had serious doubts about its truth.