A Russian technology executive who was named in a dossier containing unverified allegations about connections between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government has sued BuzzFeed News, which published the information.
The defamation suit was filed in court on Friday in Broward County, Florida, according to lawyers for the executive, Alexei Gubarev, chief of XBT, a technology company based in Luxembourg.
The suit focuses on allegations, made near the end of the dossier, that Gubarev and his company were involved in hacking operations against the leadership of the US Democratic Party.
In the complaint, Gubarev’s lawyers say that BuzzFeed acted recklessly; that none of the statements have any basis in fact and that Gubarev’s association with the dossier has left his reputation “in tatters,” compromised his family’s security and damaged his company’s business prospects.
It called BuzzFeed’s decision “perhaps one of the most reckless and irresponsible moments in modern ‘journalism.’”
The publishing of the dossier was one of the most startling moments of the weeks before Trump’s inauguration.
Compiled by a former British intelligence operative who was hired by Trump’s Republican rivals and later by supporters of failed Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, the document had circulated for months among high-ranking government officials and journalists. The veracity of its claims had been investigated, but never proved.
However, after CNN last month reported that intelligence officials had presented a summary of the allegations to Trump and US President Barack Obama, BuzzFeed decided to publish the document in full, saying that “Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.”
When it published the dossier, BuzzFeed said that it contained errors and that its claims had not been verified.
BuzzFeed ignited a debate over the claims in the report as well as the outlet’s decision to break from typical journalistic practices in publishing it.
Trump denounced the unproven claims as a smear, and called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage” during a heated news conference on Jan. 11.
Gubarev’s lawsuit claims that while more than 30 publications tried to contact him after the dossier’s publication, he was not contacted by BuzzFeed for his response to the allegations.
Gubarev, 36, lives in Cyprus with his wife and three children. He founded the site Webzilla — which is also identified in the report, the complaint notes — and built it into an international business, XBT, with more than 300 employees around the world.
The lawsuit was filed in Florida, where Webzilla is registered.
After learning of the lawsuit on Friday, BuzzFeed removed the names of Gubarev and his company from the dossier.
“We have redacted Mr. Gubarev’s name from the published dossier, and apologize for including it,” the company said in an e-mailed statement to the New York Times.
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