The NRA has been reeling with lawsuits, internal power struggles, and financial issues. The face of the organization, Wayne LaPierre, has been the focus of much of the news about the National Rifle Association, along with his use of the nonprofit organization’s funds. One of the casualties of the NRA’s economic anxieties was its online television station, NRATV, which shuttered its doors at the beginning of last summer. The abrupt end of the racist and awful channel led to a few lawsuits. The nonprofit website TheTrace reports that one of those lawsuits alleges that Wayne LaPierre and his family had video footage showing him hunting an elephant in Botswana pulled before it aired.
The lawsuit stems from a long-running program called Under Wild Skies, the producers of which, as Under Wild Skies LLC, allege through their attorneys that the NRA did not pay for all the episodes of the program that they produced for the gun group. The NRA reportedly argued in court that the production company did not fulfill its end of a contractual agreement, alleging that there were two missing episodes. The legal filing by Under Wild Skies LLC’s attorneys says that the episodes in question were shot and edited together, but that they were “not released at the sole direction of Wayne LaPierre.” Why would this happen?
Well, according to the filing, the episodes in question include the LaPierres hunting big game, and show Wayne LaPierre shooting a number of times at an elephant during a hunt. According to the lawsuit, Susan LaPierre, Wayne’s wife, is filmed cutting the dead elephant’s tail off, holding it in the air, and saying, “Victory... with Under Wild Skies!”
Why did the LaPierres decide not to promote their big game hunting? It’s hard to say. One of the NRA’s bios for LaPierre includes the boast that he is “a skilled hunter, from Chesapeake waterfowl to African Cape buffalo.”
According to The Trace, Under Wild Skies is hosted by Tony Makris, an executive at Ackerman McQueen—the marketing firm that is now embroiled in back-and-forth lawsuits with the NRA. Under Wild Skies ran for 26 years, and had purchased slots on NBC before it was canceled in 2013 due to controversy over an episode in which Makris killed an elephant in Botswana and compared his critics to Hitler. But with the help of the NRA and Ackerman McQueen, Under Wild Skies found a new life on NRATV; and Makris’ production company, Mercury, was paid many millions of dollars in advertising fees by the NRA during that time. Botswana outlawed commercial elephant hunting in 2014; The Trace notes that it is not known when the elephant hunt undertaken by the LaPierres in the unaired footage took place.
Did LaPierre scuttle the episode because he didn’t think it looked good to be hunting an elephant in 2018? Probably. It really doesn’t matter. It is just a nice reminder that the faux-machismo of these gun-toting executives is just that. It’s all show and optics, whether they are real hunters or play hunters, and bad press affects them a lot more than they like to let on.
The lawsuit against LaPierre and the NRA claims that the gun organization stopped making payments in September 2019 as retaliation in the ongoing power struggles and legal problems between the NRA and Ackerman McQueen. The NRA denies this.