MINNEAPOLIS — The above video originally aired on February 7, 2025.
A judge ruled in favor of Alpha News and reporter Liz Collin, who requested that the Minneapolis Police Department’s Assistant Chief’s defamation lawsuit be dismissed.
Judge Edward T. Wahl determined that none of the statements Assistant Minneapolis Police Chief Katie Blackwell challenged were “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.”
Blackwell sued Collin and Alpha News over her portrayal in the documentary “The Fall of Minneapolis” and the book “They’re Lying.”
Blackwell was an important witness in the murder trial of former MPD officer Derek Chauvin. She was previously the head of MPD’s training department. According to Blackwell’s lawsuit, her testimony “was truthful and factual” and Collin cast her as “a conspirator who committed perjury.”
An excerpt from a book states, “It doesn’t seem like Inspector Blackwell knows how MPD officers are trained — or maybe she was lying.”
As a result, in court documents, Blackwell stated that she was no longer a “welcomed person in the police community” and was facing “accusations from other officers that she lied, calling her integrity into question.”
Judge Wahl stated in his opinion that he is not reaching a conclusion on the merits of this debate, but rather whether the statements made during the debate were defamatory under the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act.
“The Court neither finds nor implies that any of Blackwell’s testimony in the Chauvin trial was false, improper, or misleading,” the lawyer said.
In her testimony at the federal civil rights trial for the other officers, Blackwell went into greater detail about the differences between the MRT restraint and Chauvin’s knee to the neck.