Whoopi Goldberg spoke for many Americans last year on “The View” when she said, “I’m sick of hearing about that laptop. This laptop, I hope it just crumbles to death, I hate it so much.”
You don’t have to be ideologically aligned with Goldberg, or even like “The View,” to agree with the entertainer on this point.
Nobody hates that laptop, however, more than Hunter Biden, the president’s son and the owner — or at least, former owner — of the silver Apple MacBook Pro that made a cameo appearance in the younger Biden’s recent trial on federal charges that he illegally purchased a gun.
Biden was found guilty of three felony counts in that trial and will be sentenced later this year. Whatever happens, it’s fair to say that the trove of scandalous photos that made their way to the public after the laptop was left at a Delaware repair shop are as upsetting to him as his legal travails.
Now Biden is suing Fox News over its use of the images in a program for its streaming service Fox Nation. In a lawsuit filed Sunday in Manhattan, Biden says the network violated a law passed in 2019 to prohibit people from sharing sexually explicit images without the subject’s permission — a type of law known as a “revenge porn” law.
Don’t rush to Fox Nation to see the show — the network removed the six-part series from the platform citing an “abundance of caution” after Biden threatened to sue in April.
“The Trial of Hunter Biden” is an imagining of how a criminal trial against Hunter Biden might play out if the president’s son had been charged with bribery and violating “foreign agent” laws that govern financial dealings with other governments — charges he has not actually faced.
While the show makes clear that it’s not an actual trial, the judge in the series is Joe Brown, a judge known for his reality show, and “The Trial of Hunter Biden” uses real-life images of Biden that he and his family would prefer that no one see.
For that matter, lots of us would have preferred not to see any of these images. I have never once sought out an image from Hunter Biden’s laptop, but several are ingrained in my mind, having seen them pop up, unbidden, on websites and social media. They are the kind of images that, once seen, you can’t unsee. And you don’t have to be a supporter of President Joe Biden to wish that this particular unpleasantness hadn’t befallen the first family — or, for that matter, the nation.
Between former President Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial about money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and this new lawsuit, never before has the word “porn” been so prevalent in discourse about a presidential election. Perhaps Hunter Biden’s attorneys didn’t think carefully enough about the possibility that the words “revenge porn” would show up in every story written about this lawsuit.
If I were advising the president’s son, I wouldn’t want the word “porn” appearing in the same ZIP code with his name — in any context, plaintiff or defendant. But here we are, and a nation weary of scandal now has to consider anew images that have been too much with us for nearly four years. Worse, the series in question came out in 2022. The lawsuit seems a tad late.
This may not be an instance of political lawfare, but of an embarrassed father who has struggled with addiction and is trying every possible avenue of reputation repair. Biden alleges in the lawsuit, which seeks punitive and compensatory damages, that Fox disseminated these “intimate” images “in order to humiliate, harass, annoy and alarm Mr. Biden and to tarnish his reputation,” according to The New York Times.
In April, after Biden’s attorneys first threatened to sue, Fox put out a statement regarding what the network called its “constitutionally protected coverage” of the president’s son. “Mr. Biden is a public figure who has been the subject of investigations by both the Department of Justice and Congress, has been indicted by two different US Attorney’s Offices in California and Delaware, and has admitted to multiple incidents of wrongdoing,” the statement said, per NPR.
A Fox spokeswoman said much the same on Monday, telling The New York Times, “Consistent with the First Amendment, Fox News has accurately covered the newsworthy events of Mr. Biden’s own making, and we look forward to vindicating our rights in court.”
We’ll have to see how this plays out in court, but a former federal prosecutor, Neama Rahmani, told Newsweek that New York’s law was designed to protect people in intimate relationships from public exposure and harassment and that “Fox News has a good First Amendment argument to get the case dismissed.”
Part of the unsavory debate to which we will now be subjected, if the lawsuit goes forward, will involve whether Hunter Biden is a public figure as Fox News maintains, or a private citizen as Delaware Sen. Tom Carper and others have said. With Hunter Biden reportedly advising his father on whether he should stay in the presidential race, he’s certainly no ordinary private citizen, and this is no ordinary presidential race. Would that it were.