--- title: "Jesse Ventura Takes His Last Shots At ‘American Liar’ Chris Kyle As He Drops Lawsuit" date: "2017-12-05" modified: "2017-12-05" authors: - name: "James Clark" job_title: "Editor-in-Chief" link: "https://taskandpurpose.com/authors/james-clark/" url: "https://taskandpurpose.com/news/jesse-ventura-chris-kyle-lawsuit/" categories: - "Culture" - "Entertainment" tags: - "Navy SEALs" - "special operations command" --- # Jesse Ventura Takes His Last Shots At ‘American Liar’ Chris Kyle As He Drops Lawsuit ![]() Jesse Ventura — the former one-term independent Minnesota governor, ex-Navy frogman, and retired pro wrestler — held a press conference in Minneapolis Dec. 4 to celebrate his most recent, uh, achievement: winning a settlement in his five-year-long defamation case against the estate of dead SEAL sniper Chris Kyle. “I’m smiling. Everyone see the smile?” Ventura told a crowd of journalists, before ranting about “fake news,” railing against the court system, and referring to Kyle, the *American Sniper* author, as an “American liar,” [according to]() a Minneapolis-based CBS affiliate. Ventura has been embroiled in a legal dispute with the estate of the deceased Navy SEAL veteran over Kyle’s claim in his 2012 best-selling memoir that he and Ventura got into a bar brawl — an event Ventura has repeatedly said never happened, the Associated Press [reports](). “I didn’t start this,” Ventura said at the press conference. “He wrote the lie. I didn’t even know who he was prior to this.” Ventura has long held that Kyle’s claim that he insulted deceased Navy SEALs (which led to the alleged fight) ruined the ex-governor’s reputation in the military and veterans’ community. “My reputation means more than money,” Ventura said at the conference. “You don’t pay if you’re innocent. You go to court. That's what I did. And if you’re the other side and you do pay, that tells you who was telling the truth, right there.” Related: Jesse Ventura Sounds Off On Weed, Suing Chris Kyle, And Why He Wouldn’t Enlist Today » Ventura’s defamation suit continued against Kyle’s estate following the Navy SEAL veteran’s murder on Feb. 2, 2013, at a shooting range in Chalk Mountain, Texas, by Marine veteran [Eddie Ray Routh](). Kyle was widely regarded as the deadliest sniper in United States military history, but following his death, a number of claims made in his memoir have come under suspicion, with some suggesting that Kyle even misrepresented his military awards. Ventura was awarded $1.8 million in the case in 2014, but that award was overturned in the U.S. 8th District Court of Appeals on June 13, 2016; a subsequent Supreme Court ruling upheld that decision. “The jury said I was right, the judge who tried the case agreed,” Ventura said at the conference, [according to]() CBS. “You have two judges who overturned it who never heard a shred of evidence…that’s what’s wrong with our system.” A second lawsuit was in the works when the the settlement — for an untold sum of money — was recently reached and Ventura agreed to drop his defamation case, CBS [reports](). Neither Ventura nor his lawyer would say whether the money came from *American Sniper* publisher HarperCollins or its insurance company, but Ventura said the settlement did not come from Kyle’s widow or his estate, [according to]() the Associated Press. Ventura also made it clear that he has not received an apology from anyone. When asked by reporters about the terms of the settlement, Ventura responded: “My apology is in the bank.” **WATCH NEXT:** ## Author James Clark is the editor-in-chief of Task & Purpose. He is a former Marine and a veteran of the War in Afghanistan. ### Author social links [Twitter]() [LinkedIn]()