A federal judge ordered Wednesday that YouTube must take down a film blamed by the Obama administration for sparking the deadly September 2012 protests at the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the video hosting site to yank the controversial 14-minute film, “Innocence of Muslims.”
The court found the film’s producer and director, Mark Basseley Youssef (aka Sam Bacile), duped actress Cindy Lee Garcia into appearing in the film and infringed her copyright to her role.
The ruling addressed only the copyright issue, not the film’s content, which YouTube has contended did not violate its terms of service.
“Garcia’s performance was used in a way that she found abhorrent and her appearance in the film subjected her to threats of physical harm and even death,” Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote for the majority court. “Despite these harms, and despite Garcia’s viable copyright claim, Google refused to remove the film from YouTube.”
By about 3 p.m. Wednesday, the film was no longer available on YouTube.
The film was blamed for sparking violence across the Middle East in late 2012 and forced the filmmaker, Youssef, into hiding. He was later sentenced to a year in jail.
Garcia filed an emergency restraining order against Google’s YouTube site on Sept. 20 , 2012, to try and get the film pulled down.
A judge denied the request, despite the fact that Garcia said she’d been deluged by death threats – and not told what the film she was starring in was really about.
She recalled answering a casting call for an “adventure” film about ancient Egypt titled “Desert Warrior,” and worked four days on the set last year. She said Nakoula was working under the name Sam Bacile at the time and never mentioned Islam nor Muhammad during production.
“This needs to come off [YouTube], because it’s going to continue to cause more problems,” she said in 2012. “I want it off because it’s degrading, demoralizing and it affected our country, our ambassador [in Libya]and our Navy SEALS.”
“Yes we have a right to freedom of speech, but what [Youssef] did was wrong,” she said. “It was wrong in so many ways.”
Even President Obama urged the site to take down the clip, to no avail.
The judge at the time denied Garcia’s request, ultimately deciding that only the filmmaker owned the copyright to the Muslim-mocking clip, which depicts Muhammad as a womanizing pedophile and fraud.
The Obama administration initially blamed the clip for the attacks on the American embassy in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, that ended with the murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
The administration later backed off the claim and deemed it a planned strike by Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists.
A New York Times expose late last year, though, determined that the attack actually was fueled by the film, which generated anti-American sentiment across the Arab world.
With News Wire Services
sgoldstein@nydailynews.com or follow on Twitter
