Photographers Raise Funds for Nick Ut’s Lawsuit Against ‘The Stringer’ Documentary

Photographer Nick Ut | GoFundMe/David Kennerly

A GoFundMe page has been set up to fund Nick Ut’s legal fees as he plans a defamation lawsuit against the makers of The Stringer documentary which asserts he did not take the famous Napalm Girl photograph during the Vietnam War.

Aired at Sundance Film Festival, The Stringer claims that Thanh Nghe, a driver for NBC, took the photo instead. The claims originate from former AP photo editor Carl Robinson, who says that his boss, Horst Faas, told him to swap the names of Ut and Nghe on the credit the day the photo was taken in the Saigon bureau.

Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist David Kennerly and a friend of Ut launched the fundraiser to “support Nick in his fight against the producer of a film that defamed Nick.”

“It seems the Vietnam War will never end,” Kennerly writes on Facebook. “The producers of a film called The Stringer that premiered recently at the Sundance Film Festival (and rightfully came up empty in the awards category) defames Nick Ut. They allege that Nick didn’t take the picture of Kim Phuc running down the road after being hit by napalm.”

“The photo, one of the most famous ever made, won Nick the Pulitzer Prize in 1973,” he continues. “Like soldiers, photographers don’t leave their dead or wounded on the battlefield. Now is the time to come to Nick’s aid and donate to the legal fund we established to prosecute the filmmakers who slandered Nick.”

A still from ‘The Stringer’ allegedly showing Thanh Nghe at the scene of the Napalm Girl photograph in 1972. | VII Foundation

Ut also has the support of the family of Joseph Galloway, an American newspaper correspondent who reported from Vietnam in the 1970s.

“I find it curious that the person disparaging him has chosen to do this after the very people who could bear witness to Nick’s work are now deceased,” writes his daughter Gracie on Facebook.

In a lengthy Substack article, Carl Robinson — the former AP editor who claims he swapped the credit — says on that fateful day in 1972 his boss Horst Faas “leaned into my right ear and ordered in his harsh German accent, ‘Nick Ut. Make it Nick Ut’.”

Robinson doesn’t elaborate on why Faas, a widely-respected figure who spent more time in Vietnam than any other photographer, told him to swap credits, but a Variety review of The Stringer says that it is because Faas wanted the photo to be credited to an AP staffer rather than a stringer. Faas died in 2012.

The Terror of War. | Associated Press

The established story of Napalm Girl goes that upon seeing the photo, Robinson believed the full-frontal nudity in the image rendered it unusable. But he was overruled, first by Faas and then by AP’s photo chief Hal Buell in New York City.

Robinson still believes the world should never have seen the image since he writes on Substack: “Both NBC and Britain’s ITN later showed the children running past with a side view of the naked Kim Phuc. With more discretion than AP, their full-frontal image of the Napalm Girl had ended up on the cutting room floor.”

This is despite the image appearing on front pages everywhere and is credited as turning the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War — so much so that President Richard Nixon doubted the authenticity of the photograph, which is officially titled The Terror of War.

PetaPixel has repeatedly asked the VII Foundation, the production company, for a screener of The Stringer but has so far been unsuccessful.