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One People’s Project

Conservative propagandist James O’Keefe, best known for his enormously doctored videos fraudulently smearing the community organization ACORN as criminally assisting prostitution, has settled a lawsuit with one of the ACORN workers he smeared in the videos, agreeing to pay $100,000 in the settlement.

According to NJ.com, the video in question was alleged to have Juan Carlos Vera, who worked in the National City, Calif., office of ACORN, agree to help O’Keefe smuggle underage girls into the U.S. from Mexico to act as prostitutes. Although this was untrue and Vera had reported the exchange with O’Keefe and his accomplice Hannah Giles to the police immediately afterwards – a fact omitted by O’Keefe at the time – Vera was still fired by the organization. The lawsuit however, came about due to a California state law that bans secretly recording someone’s voice and image.

O’Keefe still denies wrongdoing, a statement on his website referring to the payout as a “nuisance settlement”. “There comes a time when the cost to defend yourself against meritless accusations becomes so burdensome financially and personally, it is simply too great,” he wrote. “The settlement admits no liability and there is no benefit from extending this ridiculous lawsuit.”

O’Keefe, a New Jersey native and Rutgers graduate, is known for his hidden-camera sting videos in which he gets his targets to say something damning or agree to an illegal act. Previous targets have included the NJEA, National Public Radio, ACORN, and other groups associated with the political left. However he has received criticism because the videos appeared to be doctored in a unfavorable way. Much of O’Keefe’s work would have a racist bent to them, which many of his supporters would deny, however a 2006 photograph of O’Keefe participating in a white supremacist forum hosted by the white nationalist Robert A. Taft Club brought those concerns even moreso in the spotlight. O’Keefe himself never spoke on that particular forum and his participation in it save for a small statement through surrogates, but as of 2011, he was still working with the Taft Club membership speaking at Providence College in Rhode Island at the invitation of Youth for Western Civilization, which was founded by Taft Club members.

Conservatives for a time celebrated O’Keefe as a “citizen journalist” and a hero, but he quickly fell out of favor soon after his 2010 arrest in a federal building in Louisiana, where he had gone to execute one of his video stings against U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, by posing as a telephone repairman to investigate claims that Landrieu’s staff ignored constituent calls. But O’Keefe and three associates were arrested instead. Originally charged with a felony, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of entering federal property under false pretenses and eventually was sentenced to three years’ probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine.

Since then, O’Keefe continued to make missteps, once attempting to lure then-CNN Correspondent Abbie Bordreau onto a boat filled with sex toys and hidden cameras for some contrived prank where the boat to set sail with O’Keefe and Boudreau aboard, so that the reporter would be unable to escape, at which point O’Keefe would try to “seduce” her. In a more recent stunt, O’Keefe might have run afoul of election laws in New Hampshire when he and accomplices, in what was being touted by him as showing proof of the need for voter ID laws, reportedly procured ballots under false names.

According to Vera’s attorney, O’Keefe and his attorneys wanted to keep the conditions of the settlement private, but were refused. Hannah Giles settled last summer with Vera, the conditions of that settlement undisclosed. In May, a deposition revealed that O’Keefe made $65,000 and Giles made $60,000 through the late Andrew Breitbart’s conservative media ventures. Both O’Keefe and Giles were given immunity from criminal prosecution when they agreed to hand over the unedited versions of the California videos, according to reports.