Matt Picht
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LEARN MOREPosted: 5:30 p.m. EST Dec 28, 2016
CBS is facing a $750 million defamation lawsuit over its TV special on the unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey.
"The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey," which aired in September, featured a team of investigators re-examining evidence from this 20-year-old cold case. Their conclusions strongly implicated JonBenet's older brother, Burke Ramsey.
JonBenét Ramsey was killed in her family home on Dec. 25, 1996, when she was six years old. The case is still being investigated by the Boulder Police Department.
Burke Ramsey, who's now 29, claims in a lawsuit CBS falsely accused him and unfairly defamed his reputation. He's asking for $250 million in compensation and $500 million in punitive damages.
LawNewz obtained a copy of the lawsuit, which reads in part, "CBS perpetrated a fraud upon the public — instead of being a documentary based on a new investigation by a so-called team of experts, 'The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey' was a fictional crime show based primarily on a preconceived storyline scripted in a self-published and commercially unsuccessful book."
The suit names CBS and outside production company Critical Content as defendants in the suit, as well as the experts featured in the series.
The entire Ramsey family was exonerated of the murder in 2008 by the Boulder, Colorado, district attorney after DNA evidence pointed to an unknown third party as the culprit.
One of the forensic experts featured in the series, Werner Spitz, is facing a separate $150 million defamation lawsuit after he explicitly accused Burke Ramsey of JonBenet's murder during an interview with a local news station.
