Dustin Hice sued CNN’s Don Lemon in 2019. Hice said the far-left host assaulted him in a bar in the Hamptons, New York, a year earlier.
Hice claimed Lemon put his hand down his own pants, touched himself, and then shoved his hand in Hice’s face.
“Anybody that acts like that in public without any fear of what it might do to somebody or the consequences it might have, that’s a pattern,” Hice told Megyn Kelly in a November 2021 post.
Lemon denied the accusations at the time.
Hice’s lawsuit detailed an encounter in 2018 at a bar in Sag Harbor.
Now this…
Hice announced this week that he was dropping his lawsuit against Don Lemon.
Mediaite reported:
CNN’s Don Lemon is breathing a sigh of relief after a lawsuit alleging he assaulted a Hamptons bartender was dropped on Monday, with the plaintiff retracting his story.
Dustin Hice filed the lawsuit back in 2019, claiming he had encountered the CNN host at a bar and Lemon had “put his hand down the front of his own shorts, and vigorously rubbed his genitalia, removed his hand and shoved his index and middle fingers into Plaintiff’s moustache under Plaintiff’s nose.”
Hice received a flood of publicity from the lawsuit, appearing on Fox News programs and Megyn Kelly’s popular podcast, but his case rapidly fell apart after the discovery phase began and Lemon’s attorneys began investigating the case and questioning witnesses. As Mediaite reported in March, when Hice’s two key witnesses were examined under oath by Lemon’s counsel Caroline Polisi, they directly contradicted Hice’s story. One of Hice’s coworkers even retracted his prior testimony.
Hice ended up removing these witnesses from his witness list, and Polisi updated the defense’s witness list to add those exact same witnesses. Needless to say, it’s rare in civil litigation for any witness cited in the original pleadings to switch sides; for two to do so is especially unusual.
