North Carolina Democrat Roy Cooper, now running for U.S. Senate, settled a defamation lawsuit by paying $75,000 and issuing a formal apology after his 2000 campaign aired an ad that wildly inflated a Republican opponent's legal fees.
Cooper personally rewrote the key line in the attack ad. In a deposition, he acknowledged scratching out the draft language claiming his opponent Dan Boyce was "demanding $1,200 an hour" and replacing it with a far more explosive figure: "charged $28,000 per hour." The ad ran statewide in the final days before the 2000 North Carolina Attorney General election, and Cooper's campaign refused to pull it even after Boyce's team demanded it stop, Breitbart reported.
The false claim worked. Boyce lost the race, pulling 46 percent to Cooper's 51 percent. But the lawsuit that followed dragged through state and federal courts for more than a decade, and when it finally neared a public trial in 2014, Cooper chose to settle rather than face a jury.
The ad at issue attacked Dan Boyce over legal fees in a case that his father, attorney Gene Boyce, had actually handled, not Dan Boyce himself. The commercial told voters a judge said the fee "shocked the conscience" and that the hourly rate exceeded what a police officer earned in an entire year. Gene Boyce was never paid $28,000 an hour. He received a fraction of the judge's calculated figure, according to the Charlotte Observer's reporting on Cooper's deposition.
The underlying case had returned more than $1 billion to North Carolina taxpayers. Cooper's ad turned that work into a weapon, and did so with a number Cooper himself had fabricated in his own handwriting.
Cooper's campaign at the time operated under a blunt internal directive to "hit Boyce and hit him soon," with the race considered close. Morgan Jackson, the campaign consultant who led Cooper's effort in 2000, is now running Cooper's U.S. Senate campaign against Republican Michael Whatley. That continuity raises a fair question about whether the same win-at-any-cost instinct still drives the operation.
Dirty campaign tactics are hardly unique to one party, a Missouri GOP candidate was recently charged with plotting to plant cocaine on a primary rival. But Cooper's case stands apart because the defamation was proven in a legal proceeding, and Cooper himself admitted under oath that he personally altered the ad's language.
Dan Boyce sued Cooper for defamation, and the case wound through both state and federal courts for more than a decade. Cooper fought it at every level. He even petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf. The Court declined.
When the case finally approached a public trial in 2014, Cooper settled. He paid $75,000 plus mediator fees, as WRAL reported.
He also issued a written apology that named four people his ad had smeared:
"Gene Boyce, Dan Boyce, Laura Isley, and Phillip Isley are all excellent and ethical lawyers and honorable people. To the extent the political TV ad in the 2000 election for Attorney General implied anything else, we were wrong and apologize."
That apology came fourteen years after the damage was done, long after the election was over, long after Cooper had won the office, and long after the people named in the ad had lived with the false accusation.
Democrats have faced a string of legal and ethical setbacks in recent months. A Maryland judge blocked a Democratic redistricting ballot measure, calling it "intentionally misleading." Cooper's defamation settlement fits a broader pattern of Democratic figures whose conduct draws judicial rebuke.
Gene Boyce also sought accountability through the North Carolina State Bar, filing an ethics complaint alleging professional misconduct by Cooper. But the State Bar had an obvious conflict: Cooper, as Attorney General, served as its attorney. Gene Boyce argued the Bar could not fairly investigate its own client.
On March 14, the year is not specified in available reporting, the State Bar filed a motion to dismiss Boyce's complaint. Boyce responded with arguments for why the complaint should be heard in court. The Bar's motion succeeded, but on standing grounds, not on the merits of the misconduct allegations, Carolina Journal reported.
In other words, the ethics body never examined whether Cooper's conduct was actually wrong. It simply ruled that Boyce lacked the procedural footing to force the question. The substance of the complaint, that the state's top law enforcement officer had fabricated a number in a campaign ad and broadcast it statewide, went unaddressed.
Cooper had served 14 years in the North Carolina General Assembly before winning the 2000 Attorney General race. He went on to win the governorship and has now powered six statewide victories with the same campaign team. The Senate race against Whatley would be his seventh.
The Democratic Party has shown little appetite for holding its own members accountable for legal or ethical problems. One Democratic congressional challenger carries an arrest record that includes a DUI crash, yet the party apparatus has not blinked. Cooper's defamation settlement drew no visible consequence from Democratic leadership either.
Cooper now asks North Carolina voters to trust him with a U.S. Senate seat. But the 2000 episode is not a youthful mistake or a staff error that slipped through. Cooper sat with a draft ad, crossed out a real number, and wrote in a false one that was more than twenty times larger. His campaign aired it statewide. When the victim's campaign asked him to stop, he refused. When the victim sued, Cooper fought for fourteen years before paying $75,000 and admitting the ad was wrong.
Internal party tensions have not slowed Cooper's ambitions. House Democratic leadership recently threatened retaliation against members who broke ranks, a reminder that the party prizes loyalty over accountability. Cooper's record suggests he absorbed that lesson early.
A candidate who fabricated a number, broadcast it to millions, refused to stop when caught, fought the resulting lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court, and only apologized when a trial date loomed is not a candidate who made an honest mistake. That is a candidate who got caught, and waited until the cost of fighting exceeded the cost of admitting it.
Voters can decide whether that record belongs in the United States Senate. The facts already decided whether it belonged in a courtroom.
