Inside Candace Owens' Legal Issues

Candace Owens, conservative commentator and Donald Trump supporter, has been involved in her fair share of drama in recent years with her outspoken, sometimes inflammatory tendencies. She got temporarily suspended from YouTube in September 2024 for hate speech, with one of her interviews with Kanye "Ye" West taken down — Ye has a history of problematic behavior. She and the Daily Wire also parted ways in March 2024. Owens even came after Taylor Swift for her relationship with Travis Kelce, which Swifties called her out on. Then there's her history of being involved in legal issues; it first started when she was in high school.

In 2016, Owens wrote an "open letter" for the Stamford Advocate in which she detailed receiving threatening, racist voicemails from a group of boys in 2007 when she was a senior in high school. She explained that she'd reported the incident to the school, but it took six weeks before any charges were filed — she felt the delay was because one of the boys connected to the incident was the son of Dannel Malloy, who was mayor of Stamford in 2007 and elected governor of Connecticut in 2011. Her family sued the Board of Education over the matter, and they were awarded $37,500.

In 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Owens posted about COVID-19 and flu deaths, basically suggesting that COVID-19 wasn't as dangerous as the government was saying, according to AP News. USA Today and Lead Stories LLC were both organizations that produced articles that fact-checked Owens' posts and reported that they were inaccurate. The posts then got labeled as false by Facebook. Owens responded by unsuccessfully suing Lead Stories and USA Today. The lawsuit was first dismissed in July 2021. There wasn't any evidence found of defamation, malicious intent, or that the organizations had interfered with her contractual obligations. Owens appealed the decision, but the dismissal was upheld by Delaware's Supreme Court in February 2022.

That was not Owens' first time suing. In 2019, she sued the real-estate company that owned her luxury apartment in Stamford, Connecticut. She declared that she got sick from the mold and mildew in her home, and the real estate company counter-sued. They argued in their court filing that Owens had been at least partially responsible for any moisture problems in her apartment. They also said that she didn't pay the $3,550 per month in rent she owed from September 2016 to January 2017. The defendant won its counterclaim, and in 2021, the judge issued an order awarding the company over $20,000 in damages and attorney's fees.

Candace Owens has herself been sued by Congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik, and Owens came out on top in that situation. Here's what happened. Owens and Klacik — a conservative who'd run (and lost) the U.S. House of Representatives election in Maryland in 2020 — had been going after each other online for a while. Things came to a head in the summer of 2021. In a long video posted to Instagram, Owens laid out all the reasons she felt that Klacik was shady. Owens said that Klacik had done a number of unsavory things, including engaging in campaign fraud and doing illegal drugs. She also referred to Klacik disparagingly as having worked as a stripper.

Klacik fired back on social media as well as filing a $20 million defamation lawsuit against Owens. Fast forward to December 2022, and a Tennessee judge ruled that the lawsuit would be "dismissed with prejudice." That means that Klacik couldn't file another similar lawsuit against Owens. Klacik was also required to pay Owens $115,000 to cover legal fees.