Jesse “The Body” Ventura, the former Minnesota governor, touted Friday his victory in a $1.8 million defamation lawsuit against Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was the subject of “American Sniper.”
“Imagine, I took on this alleged dead war hero and his grieving widow, how much evidence there must have been for the jury to have overwhelmingly sided with me as well as the judge,” Ventura told CNN’s “New Day.”
Ventura won a judgment against Kyle and his widow in a Minnesota court last July. Kyle was murdered by a Marine veteran in 2013, although Ventura filed his lawsuit a year before Kyle was killed.
“I didn’t say he defamed me. He did defame me. He lied about me,” he said.
The fight stems from a passage in Kyle’s 2012 book which inspired the movie where he described a 2006 bar fight with a man who allegedly insulted the Navy SEALs. Kyle later claimed that man was Ventura.
The Kyle family’s attorney told the Dallas Morning News that they plan to appeal the decision.