A defamation lawsuit from Roy Cooper’s first statewide campaign is drawing fresh attention as the North Carolina Democrat seeks a U.S. Senate seat, according to a Breitbart report published Wednesday. The piece details how Cooper, then a candidate for state Attorney General in 2000, was forced to pay $75,000 and issue a formal written apology to a Republican opponent after a campaign ad he personally edited included a false claim about legal fees.
At the time, Cooper had spent 14 years in the North Carolina General Assembly before setting his sights on the Attorney General’s office. With the race considered close, his campaign — managed by consultant Morgan Jackson, the same strategist working on his current Senate bid, per the report — decided it needed to “hit Boyce and hit him soon,” referring to GOP opponent Dan Boyce.
The Ad and the Deposition
According to the Breitbart account, which cites a Charlotte Observer report, Cooper acknowledged in a deposition that he personally revised a draft campaign ad. The original draft accused Boyce of “demanding $1,200 an hour.” Cooper said he scratched out that figure and replaced it with the claim that Boyce had “charged $28,000 per hour.”
The resulting commercial told voters a judge had called the fee something that “shocked the conscience,” and noted the hourly rate exceeded what a police officer earned in a year. It aired across the state in the final days before the election. Boyce’s campaign asked Cooper to pull the ad; he declined. Boyce ultimately lost, taking 46 percent of the vote to Cooper’s 51 percent.
The claim was untrue, and according to the deposition, Cooper knew it. The case referenced in the ad had actually been handled by Boyce’s father, Gene Boyce — not Dan Boyce. The elder Boyce was never paid $28,000 an hour. That figure stemmed from a judge’s calculation, and he received only a fraction of it, according to the report. The underlying lawsuit had returned more than $1 billion to North Carolina taxpayers.
A Decade of Litigation and a Settlement
Cooper fought the defamation suit for more than a decade as it wound through both state and federal courts. He unsuccessfully asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, the report states. But as the case neared a public trial in 2014, Cooper settled.
Under the terms, he paid $75,000, covered mediator fees, and delivered a written apology to the Boyce family. That apology read in part: “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.”
Gene Boyce later sought an independent ethics investigation into Cooper’s conduct, arguing the North Carolina State Bar had a conflict of interest because Cooper served as its attorney. The State Bar dismissed Boyce’s complaint on standing grounds rather than on the allegations of misconduct, according to the report.
The same political operation behind the 2000 ads has helped Cooper win six statewide races, the Breitbart report notes, and is now aiming for a seventh as he campaigns for the Senate against Republican Michael Whatley.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/09/16/democrat-roy-cooper-was-sued-for-defamation-and-forced-to-apologize-in-first-statewide-campaign/