New York Post Facing Possible Lawsuit Over Boston Bombings Front Page

Things are about to get expensive for Rupert Murdoch.

When the New York Post published the photo of two teens on its April 18 front page, implying that they were the Boston Marathon bombers, the tabloid embarrassed itself. The two teens pictured were totally innocent and it set off a national outrage. Now, it seems the Post will have pay for its mistake.

El Hussein Barhoum, the father of one of the teens, is consulting lawyers to sue the Post. As Erik Wemple reports for the Washington Post:

Should the family file a civil complaint, it’ll surely address the upheaval that the New York Post has helped bring to the Barhoum household. The son in the photo, Salah Barhoum, a 16-year-old track athlete (other accounts say he’s 17), sleeps one or two hours per night these days, says El Houssein Barhoum, and sometimes “refuses to go to school.” “He says, ‘I don’t want people to ask me a lot of questions,’ ” the father reports.

Before the photo hit the New York Post, it circulated on the Internet, a scary development that prompted Salah Barhoum to meet with authorities to clear his name. That was on Wednesday, two days after the bombings. On Thursday, the Post chose to showcase Salah Barhoum and a friend.

Following all the attention, “We were just scared to go outside,” says El Houssein Barhoum, who says he works at a Cosi restaurant in Boston. On account of the sleepless nights he spends thinking about his kid, Barhoum says he’s been arriving late to work. “Recently, because usually I keep thinking about my son and about my family and in the morning, it’s hard for me to wake up early and I become lazy again,” says El Houssein Barhoum, who immigrated from Morocco with his family about eight years ago. “My future is based on my kids, so when you see your future is like really like the destruction of your kids’ future, so how can you feel? My capital is my kids. If something happens to them, it happens to me, too.”

Staffers from the New York Post, says El Houssein Barhoum, visited his home In Revere, Mass., on the same day that “Bag Men” appeared on the paper’s cover. “They come here at my home, check his real name and took some pictures,” he recalls. When asked if they’d apologized for the high-profile photograph, El Houssein Barhoum said they hadn’t. “If they won’t apologize, it’s not between me and the New York Post,” he says. “They should apologize on the newspaper. They should write something on the newspaper, not between us. If they make a bad image of your son, they should make a good image just to correct.”

Barhoum stands to do quite well suing the New York Post—and not just because the right wing New York tabloid inherently makes an unsympathetic plaintiff in Suffolk County Superior Court. The Post previously erroneously reported that authorities had a suspect in custody from Saudi Arabia as well.

Although the Post since has published a story noting that the two teens on its front page have been cleared, it has stood by its use of that image and all of its reporting around the bombing. This has put the Post in an even deeper hole. After all, one Tsarnaev brother is dead and the other is in jail—it has no credible argument that it was right.

The newspaper should apologize to the Barhoums, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because every day that it doesn’t, it only becomes an even less sympathetic defendant when the inevitable lawsuit is filed.

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