Three months after CBS aired its true-crime docuseries The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, the slain girl’s older brother is suing the network for $750M over the program that laid blame for the killing on him.
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CBS
Burke Ramsey, who was 10 when his 6-year-old beauty queen sister was found dead in the family’s Boulder, CO, home at Christmastime in 1996, also is suing production company Critical Content and a number of consultants involved with the program. Saying his reputation was destroyed by the three-part program, he is seeking $250M in compensatory damages and twice that in punitive damages.
When contacted by Deadline, CBS had no comment on the suit, which was filed today in a Michigan court.
The lawsuit claims CBS and its team of experts planned to conduct a “sham reinvestigation” of JonBenet’s death with “the preconceived the story line” that Ramsey killed the girl and conspired with his parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, to cover it up.
“The accusation that Burke Ramsey killed his sister was based on a compilation of lies, half-truths, manufactured information, and the intentional omission and avoidance of truthful information about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey,” the lawsuit says.
In October, Burke Ramsey filed a separate $150M suit against Dr. Werner Spitz, who appeared on The Case Of giving an interview to CBS Detroit in which he said of Burke’s involvement in the killing, “If you really, really use your free time to think about this case, you cannot come to a different conclusion.”
The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey reunited the original investigators in one of the highest-profile unsolved murders in recent history to re-examine the tragic case 20 years later. The docuseries was among multiple TV projects this year about the infamous case, including Lifetime’s original movie Who Killed JonBenet? and Investigation Discovery’s JonBenét: An American Murder Mystery. There also is a feature in the works titled Casting JonBenet, directed by Kitty Green and produced by James Schamus’ Symbolic Exchange.