If I was him, and never said this, I would fight tooth and nail to prove that this was the case. He certainly appears to have enough supporters to fund such an endeavor.
> In fairness, he's been busy with another legal battle that he appears to consider a matter of life-and-death.
Agreed, it will be very interesting to see how this particular thing goes forward from today. Ideally, he would defend himself. I wouldn't hate to be proven wrong, as heroes are few and far between.
However, post-release, becoming a main character in a certain political branch of the podcast-sphere might allow him to ignore any of these annoying factual issues and do just fine.
If "he didn't take it to court" is the strongest argument that the claim is true, that seems weak to me. I'd invoke "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" in that case.
I'm not saying it's false, I don't know, but the reporting on this has been hotly contested and there are charges of politicization all around.