Defamation lawsuit filed by Minneapolis officer against Alpha News is dismissed

In a historic First Amendment ruling, a defamation lawsuit brought by a high-ranking Minneapolis police officer against the creators of a documentary about the trial of Derek Chauvin was dismissed with prejudice Tuesday.

Department Assistant Chief Katie Blackwell had filed the suit against Alpha News and reporter Liz Collin, who questioned the honesty of Blackwell’s expert witness testimony during the 2021 trial on the murder of George Floyd.

The lawsuit centered around Collin’s book “They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and the Death of George Floyd,” and the film, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” which is based on the book.

In his 58-page order, Hennepin County Judge Edward Wahl said that Collin and her co-defendants hit every legal standard necessary to avoid the lawsuit going to trial — including that their questioning of whether Blackwell lied on the witness stand met the legal standard of “substantial truth.”

“​​I think the case will be precedent-setting,” Collin said in an interview Tuesday night. “You can’t just sue journalists because you don’t like what they report. I think we have, especially in Minnesota, lived in almost a state of fear of that, of speaking up.”

It was the first defamation case considered by the Minnesota courts since Gov. Tim Walz signed the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA) in 2024. That law is meant to limit frivolous lawsuits that seek to undermine the public discourse and gives defendants more leeway to have those suits dismissed before going to trial.

Blackwell said in a statement Wednesday that the ruling by Wahl “relied on an unconstitutional anti-SLAPP law” and that while her legal team is considering an appeal, she remains “undeterred in my commitment to perform my duties serving the communities of Minneapolis.”

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in a statement Tuesday night that Wahl’s ruling “didn’t question the truthfulness” of Blackwell’s testimony but “simply held that the speech directed at her was protected under Minnesota law.”

O’Hara praised Blackwell and her service to the city of Minneapolis in the wake of Floyd’s murder.

“I continue to stand firmly behind her character, her integrity and her leadership,” he said.

In his order, Wahl examines the high legal threshold a public figure needs to overcome to prove defamation and combed through the arguments presented within the film and book to determine that Collin and her co-defendants — director J.C. Chaix, Alpha News and White Birch Publishing — were presenting protected opinions, not “defamatory statements of fact.”

“None of the statements Blackwell challenges are defamatory as a matter of law, given the well-established caselaw assessing commentary by media figures on matters of high public interest involving limited-purpose public figures,” Wahl wrote. “In her role as a key government witness in a high-profile prosecution, Blackwell assumed the status of a limited-purpose public figure under longstanding First Amendment jurisprudence.”

“The Fall of Minneapolis” claims to show viewers “what politicians and the media don’t want you to see” about the killing of Floyd, the conviction of Chauvin and the civil unrest that caused $500 million in damage to the city of Minneapolis.

It has proven popular, racking up 3 million views on YouTube, where it is free to view. It is positioned as a counternarrative to a murder that created a global reckoning over race and a trial that was covered by every major news outlet in the country.

Blackwell testified at trial for about 30 minutes but was only in the film, for which Collin serves as the on-camera interviewer, for about 30 seconds.

Blackwell testified as a witness for the state because she had served as the commander of the Minneapolis police’s training division and had expertise on department training and policies. She was shown an image of Chauvin with his knee on the back of Floyd.

“I don’t know what kind of improvised position that is,” Blackwell told prosecuting attorney Steve Schleicher. “So, that’s not what we train.”

The film cast that testimony as a lie — using interviews with former Minneapolis officers and images of department training manuals to argue that officers were clearly trained to put their knee on the neck and back of unruly suspects during an arrest.

Blackwell filed her lawsuit in October 2024, arguing her reputation had been severely damaged by the book and film and that Collin and her professional associates had manipulated her testimony through video editing and had knowingly and maliciously lied.

Judge Wahl rejected that argument.

He said that while people who watched the livestream of Chauvin’s trial and heard Blackwell’s testimony about use of force and police policies “might reasonably conclude that Collin’s and Alpha News’s characterizations of some of Blackwell’s statements were misleading or taken out of context,” it is not the same as hitting the legal standard of showing “actionable defamatory statements” or that the defendants acted with “actual malice.”

At a motion hearing for the case earlier this year, one of Blackwell’s attorneys, Christopher Paul, told Wahl to be careful in applying the new law to this case, saying it was a “summary judgment provision on steroids.”

Attorney Chris Madel, who represented the defendants, had disagreed, saying the judge was obligated to protect First Amendment rights under UPEPA.

Using the new legislation, Wahlconcluded the issues presented in the film and book were of public concern. Wahl also ruled that Blackwell’s attorneys had not shown that the film and book made actual defamatory claims against her.

In section after section of his opinion, Wahl examined the testimony Blackwell gave, the way it was presented by Collin and her co-defendants, and saw ample room for ambiguity that had a legal right to be reported on and presented to the public. That included the question of whether Chauvin was carrying out departmental training when he kneeled on Floyd’s neck.

Wahl writes that while Blackwell was specifically testifying to the training she oversaw starting in 2019 when she was shown the image of Chauvin pinning down Floyd, there was no ambiguity to her response at trial.

“Her answer reasonably invites viewers, jurors, and now the public to conclude that the depicted technique was never trained by MPD.

“That impression is undermined by evidence in the record showing that MPD training materials from 2018-2019 — the period of Blackwell’s tenure — included images of officers applying knees to the neck or upper back,” the judge wrote.

After the opinion was issued, Madel said, “This is a complete vindication for Liz Collin, J.C. Chaix and Alpha News and a complete victory for the First Amendment.”

Blackwell’s attorneys issued a statement that they respected the court but the ruling raises constitutional questions around UPEPA. They also said anyone who watched Chauvin kneel on Floyd’s back for more than 10 minutes as he died and believes Chauvin was following MPD policy has “lost more than their moral compass, they have lost their common sense.”

Collin heaped praise on Madel and the attorneys at his firm for their handling of the suit, which she said targeted her reputation.

“There is no worse thing as a 20-plus-year journalist than to be called a liar; that’s what she was doing to me,” Collin said. “That’s a pretty big insult. If there is one thing I’ve cared about since the very start of my career, it’s facts, information, conveying that fairly to the public. That’s what I signed up for a long time ago and really what makes me tick.”

Collin said the lawsuit put her and her marriage to Bob Kroll, the former president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, at the center of the story, something she never wanted. She said her work at Alpha News has been to try to break out of what she called the “echo chamber” of news in Minnesota. She plans to continue doing that moving forward.

And while the book and film presented an alternate story to “corporate or mainstream” media stories around the trial of Chauvin and the civil unrest in the wake of Floyd’s murder, that didn’t mean it wasn’t heavily researched, reported and deserving of First Amendment protections, she said.

“I am so grateful to Judge Wahl for the ruling.”