Media giant Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is possibly going to catch a subpoena following a Thursday hearing in the $1 billion defamation suit against its subsidiary, CNN. In a hearing lasting almost four hours, exclusively recorded by NewsBusters, Florida 14th Judicial Circuit Judge Scott Henry cleared the way for Plaintiff and Navy veteran Zachary Young to issue a subpoena to turn over select financial documents that pertained to CNN. In addition, Judge Henry also signaled that punitive damages sought against CNN could go beyond the simple net worth of the network.
Looking to “boil it down to something simple,” Judge Henry delivered an analogy likening a request of financial documents from WBD to asking a doctor for the medical records of a patient involved in an accident claim:
In a car accident case, the defense does a RFP to the plaintiff saying, ‘send me all your medical records,’ but then, at the same time, there's a notice of production and subpoenas all the medical providers and gets their records not only from the accident but predating it or whatever. And it's just to make sure that what's being produced on one side is the same as what the doctor actually has in their office.
But the subpoena for CNN’s finances via WBD will be limited to the documents the network presented to its parent company. Essentially, this will act as a way to double check to see if CNN was being honest with the financial documents they were turning over as part of discovery; comparing what they turned over to Young’s legal team vs what they told corporate.
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***The complete post is on NewsBusters***
