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Baseball Players' Attorneys Spare No Insult In Lawsuit Against Al Jazeera

We take a look at highlights from Ryan Zimmerman and Ryan Howard's defamation lawsuits against Al Jazeera.
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On Tuesday, Ryan Howard and Ryan Zimmerman filed defamation suits against Al Jazeera and two of its reporters for the network's allegations of PED use in the special, "The Dark Side," which ensures this story will be in the news for awhile.

Not that it was really going away anytime soon anyway. On Wednesday, The New York Times unearthed connections between kind-of-a-chemist-but-not-actually-a-doctor-of-pharmacy Charlie Sly, the central source of Al Jazeera's report who recanted all of his hidden-camera statements, and trainer Jason Riley, whose dietary supplement company, Elementz Nutrition, featured Howard, Zimmerman and another Al Jazeera target, Packers LB Mike Neal, on its website. Riley is also the trainer credited with helping revitalize an aging Derek Jeter.

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(An interesting note: By recanting his explosive statements before the Al Jazeera report aired, Sly may have saved himself from defending a defamation suit.)

Read More: Can't Stop, Won't Stop: The Persistence of Bartolo Colon

Such links will surely be explored by Al Jazeera's lawyers as well as Major League Baseball and the NFL, who have promised to look into the allegations. Not to mention the fact that there is still the not so tiny issue of whether Peyton Manning will file his own lawsuit.

But before the depositions and investigations fire up in the baseball player lawsuits, it's fun to dig into the initial court filing for clues to how Howard's and Zimmerman's camps intend to treat Al Jazeera. The answer? Scorched earth, with the twin lawsuits depicting Al Jazeera as a bumbling, money-losing, corner-cutting, agenda-driven enterprise and its undercover reporter, Liam Collins, as a "known fraudster and publicity seeker," "among other things."

Here are some of the highlights:

To emphasize Al Jazeera's low ratings, the complaint links to a The Wrap article that states only 30,000 people watch the network every night. They go on to quote in the next paragraph:

On or about May 2015, Al Jazeera America suffered "an exodus of top executives" who left citing "a culture of fear" and a "newsroom in total 'disarray behind the scenes.'" … In fact, as a result of this exodus, as well as a $15 million discrimination lawsuit, Al Jazeera America "nearly imploded," and then-CEO Ehab Al Shihabi was removed."

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They continued their assault on Al Jazeera's business model:

Not that they kept their attacks on Al Jazeera's ratings performances. Paragraph 30 states:

"In November 2015, Al Jazeera America was forced to suspend David W. Harleston as the company's general counsel, after it was revealed that he was not licensed to practice law."

Obviously the network's investigative unit did not escape their wrath:

But really, the ballplayers' attorneys saved the worst for Collins, the former British hurdler and contestant on Britain's Got Talent.

It didn't stop there.

But this was the coup de grace: