The founders of a whites-only settlement in Sharp County are suing Sky UK and its parent company, Comcast, claiming they were defamed by a story the company produced about the founders’ efforts to create a racially exclusive enclave in northern Arkansas.

Plaintiffs Peter J. Csere, Eric Orwoll and Scott Hallowood filed the suit on Friday in federal court. Their complaint alleges that Sky UK, Comcast and British journalist Tom Cheshire are liable for defamation, false light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with business relations and civil conspiracy because the defendants’ documentary about the whites-only community included a fabricated photograph of a “a tree with a red spray-painted RTTL logo and ‘WHITES ONLY’ text” and a misattributed Twitter post reading “We started a Whites only community” that was made by an account the plaintiffs do not control. 

“RTTL” stands for “Return to the Land,” which the lawsuit characterizes as “a nationwide unincorporated private membership association with over one thousand two hundred (1,200) members” and a “separate organization from Wisdom Woods LLC,” which is the legal entity under which the plaintiffs are building their exclusionary community. We first wrote about the community in July 2025, and subsequently covered some of the legal questions surrounding the whole project last September.

According to the lawsuit, Sky UK reached out to the founders in March 2025 and sought access to the community in order to film a documentary about the project. People associated with Sky UK spent three days on the compound, “during which time they conducted extensive interviews with Plaintiffs and other residents, filmed the property and its surroundings, and were given unrestricted access to the community,” the complaint says.

Sky News published the documentary, entitled “Inside the US community building a ‘fortress for the white race’ I ‘Return to the Land”‘ on their YouTube channel in July 2025. It had been viewed close to 2 million times as of the date the lawsuit was filed, according to the complaint. Plaintiffs’ first issue with the documentary is the inclusion of this photograph, which they contend is photoshopped and not a real photograph of a tree on the property:

The lawsuit says the “doctored photograph appears in the documentary at least three times,” including as a YouTube thumbnail, at the 2:08-minute mark and at the 26:48-minute mark. (The YouTube version of the documentary has apparently been deleted since the lawsuit was filed, but the documentary is still available on Sky’s website.)

“The doctored photo was designed to create the false and defamatory impression that Plaintiffs maintain ‘Whites Only’ signage on their land – evoking the segregation-era signs that are universally understood as symbols of illegal racial discrimination,” the complaint says. “This fabricated image was designed to suggest to viewers that Plaintiffs are engaged in illegal discrimination in violation of federal and state civil rights laws – an impression reinforced by the Documentary’s narrator, who repeatedly frames the community’s activities as unlawful segregation.”

Alongside the documentary, Sky also published a written story. The lawsuit takes issue with the inclusion in that story of a tweet from an account called @RTTL_Official that said “We started a whites-only community.” According to the plaintiffs, the article falsely presents that post “as if it refers to the Wisdom Woods LLC property where Plaintiffs reside,” when the account is actually maintained by the national Return to the Land association and was not made by Wisdom Woods LLC or any of the individual plaintiffs.

While these are the two main issues in the lawsuit, the complaint also alleges that the documentary was deceptively edited to make it look like Orwoll “affirmed the community was ‘whites only’” and that the documentary’s “title and promotional materials describe the community as a ‘fortress for the white race’” without making it clear that this description was the documentarian’s opinion and not a statement of fact.

This is at least the third lawsuit in recent months to involve the settlement and/or its founders. In May, Legal Aid of Arkansas, Washington D.C.-based civil rights law firm Relman Colfax PLLC and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued Return to the Land, co-founders Eric Orwoll, Peter Csere, Gavin Baker, Peter Neugebauer and Scott Hallowood, and Wisdom Woods, alleging violations of state and federal Fair Housing Acts as well as state and federal civil rights laws. That lawsuit accuses Return to the Land of “attempting to create an all-white nation within the United States by building smaller settlements that exclude anyone who isn’t a white, Christian, heterosexual homebuyer.” That suit remains pending in the same federal district court where the more recent lawsuit was filed.

The May lawsuit also came barely six months after another suit was filed against Csere, accusing the Return to the Land co-founder of accepting nearly two years’ worth of real estate payments for land he owned in Ecuador, but never putting through the paperwork required to execute the actual sale. That suit, filed in Sharp County Circuit Court, also remains pending, and no trial date has been set.

Return to the Land was also accused of violating Arkansas securities laws in a complaint filed with the Arkansas Securities Department last September. The department’s website does not reflect that any order has been entered so far against Return to the Land based on that complaint.

In the most recent lawsuit, Csere, Orwoll and Hollowood are seeking $1.2 million in compensatory damages for harm to their reputation caused by the false statements and doctored photograph in the documentary, as well as $1.5 million in punitive damages. They also want the defendants to remove the documentary from all platforms and to issue a retraction and correction of the false statement.

One additional wrinkle to all of this is that the plaintiffs are represented in this newest lawsuit by attorney Jonathan Gross. Gross made a name for himself defending rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to prevent certification of Donald Trump’s loss of the 2020 presidential election. Gross infamously compared the January 6 prosecutions to the Holocaust.

The new lawsuit is styled as Eric Orwoll, et al., v. Sky UK Limited, et al., in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. A copy of the complaint is available here.