Jesse Ventura arrives in court
Ex-Governor, Suing Over Book,
Is Back in Minnesota’s Spotlight
By MONICA DAVEY
The New York Times
ST. PAUL — Jesse Ventura, the blunt-talking former governor with the outsize reputation, has always been hard to define. The same man who upended Minnesota’s political establishment more than a decade ago with a third-party candidacy was once better known as a professional wrestler who wore a feather boa and went by the nickname “The Body.” He has been an author, a member of a special unit of the Navy and a television host.
Now he is a plaintiff in a defamation suit in which jurors in a federal courtroom here must decide whether his reputation was harmed by a best-selling book by a former member of the Navy SEALs.
Mr. Ventura, 62, who on Tuesday sat quietly at the plaintiff’s table in a sedate gray suit, his hair in a modest silver ponytail, has sued the estate of Chris Kyle, the former SEALs member, who alluded to Mr. Ventura in his book, “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.”
The case is likely to test the higher legal standard a public figure must meet to prove defamation. The proceeding is also complicated by Mr. Kyle’s death in a shooting in Texas in 2013, about a year after the suit was filed. The death left Mr. Kyle’s widow, Taya, as the defendant on behalf of his estate. And in a state where Mr. Ventura’s legacy is still a matter of debate, the trial is also returning the former governor, who had largely faded from the political landscape, to the spotlight.
In a way, the trial here comes down to a single night. Deep into Mr. Kyle’s book, he described a confrontation on Oct. 12, 2006, at a California bar where Mr. Kyle and his friends were mourning the death of a fellow SEALs member. There, Mr. Kyle said, he argued with a man — a veteran and celebrity who, he said, criticized the nation’s policy in Iraq and suggested that the Navy SEALs “deserve” to lose a few people. Mr. Kyle wrote that he punched the man. While Mr. Kyle called the man only “Scruff Face” in his book, he later confirmed during interviews about the book that Mr. Ventura had been the subject of the passages.
But Mr. Ventura’s lawyer, David B. Olsen, said that no such confrontation had occurred, and that Mr. Ventura had since been “publicly ridiculed and publicly humiliated” within the military ranks for comments that he never made, nor would have made. “There was no incident,” Mr. Olsen said. “There was no altercation.”
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