Fatty sues ESPN, MLB and the Yankees

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A fan who dozed off during a game at Yankee Stadium hopes to score a huge windfall over the merciless ribbing he got from two ESPN announcers.
Andrew Robert Rector filed a $10 million defamation suit against Dan Shulman and John Kruk for allegedly unleashing an “avalanche of disparaging words” against him that include “stupor, fatty, unintelligent, stupid.”
The Bronx Supreme Court filing also says the play-by-play team made the taunts “knowing and intending the same to be heard and listened to by millions of people all over the world.”
Rector admits he “briefly slept” while attending an April 13 matchup between the Bronx Bombers and their longtime rivals, the Boston Red Sox.
When an ESPN camera caught him napping, Shulman and Kruk allegedly began an “unending verbal crusade” against him, with their “vituperative utterances” repeated the next day on the Major League Baseball website.
“These unmitigated verbal onslaughts crossed the line between reporting on sport and abuse against the plaintiff without reasonable cause or restraint,” Rector’s suit says.
A YouTube video posted by MLB, titled “Fan sleeps in stands during game vs. Red Sox,” shows a heavyset young man snoozing in his seat, his head tilted over his right shoulder.
Rector’s typo-ridden suit claims the “false statements” about him include suggestions that he “is a fatty cow that need two seats at a time” and “is a confused individual that neither understands nor knows anything about history and the meaning of rivalry between Red Sox and New York Yankee.”
In addition to defamation, Rector claims to have suffered “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
The suit also names as defendants ESPN, MLB and the Yankees.
ESPN declined to discuss the suit. The Yankees and MLB didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

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