Murray Energy Corp., which is waging a high-profile legal battle with HBO’s John Oliver, claims it received a flood of scabrous email messages, harassing phone calls and suffered the hacking of its website in the aftermath of the broadcast.
The nation’s largest underground coal mining company filed its suit June 21 in Marshall County, WV, charging that the June 18 episode of “Last Week Tonight” made false statements about MEC founder Robert Murray regarding a mine collapse that killed nine miners and left others injured.
It charges Oliver, HBO and its parent company Time Warner with willfully ignoring information that it supplied to the program before airing and of deliberately presenting what it knew to be false
information.
A HBO representative expressed confidence in the staff of Last Week Tonight and told USA Today that the network “does not believe anything in the show this week violated Mr. Murray’s or Murray Energy’s rights.”
Gary Broadbent, MEC, senior corporate counsel & investor/media relations director, supplied a copy of the complaint to O’Dwyer’s.
The suit says many of the menacing phone calls echoed the “false and defamatory statements” made on the program. Specifically, many of the messages took the lead of a cast member of the show and told Murray to “eat shit.”
MEC’s website, which was out of service for several days, is active again, but prior to entering the site, visitors are told that it is “checking your browser,” part of DDoS services provided by Cloudflare.
Robert Murray launched the company in 1988 and put it on the nation’s energy radar with the 2013 acquisition of Consolidation Coal.
Based in St. Clairsville, Ohio, MEC operates coal mines in Utah, Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia and the Buckeye State.
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