If you haven’t been keeping up with the pro-golf world, here’s the short and quick of the huge change that’s rocked the industry over the past few months: the Saudis have sponsored the LIV tour and now the PGA has some serious competition that it is very, very unhappy about. No monopoly likes an upstart and it’s no exception.
So, predictably, the pearl-clutching and hand-wringing about how horrible the Saudis are has started and is being used as a hammer with which the Establishment is going after both the LIV tour and those who play on it.
Well, one player on the tour is fighting back against the slander and attacks on his new tour. That would be pro-golfer Patrick Reed, who switched from playing on the PGA Tour to the LIV Tour and is furious about how Bloomberg ad CNN have framed the new PGA competitor.
In fact, he’s so mad that his lawyer has started sending letters demanding Bloomberg and CNN retract stories that he argues were “designed to incite ridicule, hatred and violence against LIV Golf players.” Here’s what Breitbart reports is going on:
The letter from attorney Larry Klayman sent both CNN a letter on Sunday claiming that the network aired a “highly defamatory” segment in which Jake Tapper and Bob Costas discussed the legal battle between the PGA Tour and LIV. Klayman also sent a letter to Bloomberg over an article that “detailed how LIV was accused of “using its U.S. lawsuit against PGA to ‘build an intelligence file’ on families of 9/11 victims who have been critical of the kingdom and its new professional golf circuit,’” according to Radar Online.
The letter to CNN was reportedly addressed to Jake Tapper, Bob Costas, new CNN CEO Chris Licht, and CNN general counsel David Vigilante, threatening to sue “if an on-air public apology is not immediately made to Mr. Reed.” Klayman also demanded that the “broadcast [be] removed and retracted from CNN’s websites, streaming services and other forms of publication, in order to mitigate the damage which they three have caused.” The letter even went as far as to say that discipline should be “meted out to Tapper and Costas.”
Klayman’s letter also claimed that the broadcast was “also designed to incite ridicule, hatred and violence against LIV Golf players.”
The Tapper segment that apparently caused such fury to come from Reed and his lawyer was one in which Tapper said “Last year, with that money, they snagged several top PGA players to come on board. The human-rights-challenged Saudis did this by offering these players quite a bit of money. A lot of money. Blood money? Sure, maybe. A lot of it.”
That broadcast was, according to Reed’s lawyer, based on the Bloomberg article quoted above.
So now Reed and his lawyer are demanding the retraction of that article and broadcast and discipline for Tapper and Costas while saying that if Bloomberg and CNN don’t go along with it, they’ll potentially seek “damages well in excess of $450,000,000 dollars which includes compensatory, actual, special and punitive damages.”
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