May 29, 2026

NAPALM GIRL: Witnesses in Nick Ut’s Defamation Trial Against Netflix Include ‘Napalm Girl’ Herself.

The film claims that Nghe was paid a miserly $20 by the Chief of Photos in Saigon, Horst Faas, for taking arguably the greatest news photo of all time. Miss Tu, who was in the AP office when the negative arrived, says she witnessed an excited Ut handing the film over to the darkroom technician, Jackson Ishizaki.

Not only that, but Miss Tu says she was the only person in AP who paid local stringers. She kept a record of all such payments, which were sent over to AP’s New York office. In her sworn testimony, Miss Tu dismisses the claims made in the documentary and also says that Faas would never have paid such a paltry amount for a photo like Napalm Girl.

Other testimonies include those by Peter Arnett and Fox Butterfield, who were also present and involved on that fateful day over 50 years ago. As well as the sworn statements, the filings also focus on Carl Robinson, the photo editor at the center of The Stringer who says he was the one who switched the credit on the behest of Horst Faas.

“Carl Robinson opposed publication of the photograph in 1972 and harbored longstanding resentment concerning the impact of the image and the broader consequences of the Vietnam War,” Ut’s lawyers James Hornstein and Martin Pradel argue.

“The submissions further state that Carl Robinson’s wife and family were Vietnamese and that the family suffered significant consequences after the fall of Saigon. The filings argue that Carl Robinson later directed bitterness and hostility toward Nick Ut.”

As Joseph Campbell, who has been writing about the “Napalm Girl” photo for years concluded last November, after attending a screening of The Stringer: More Likely Than Not, Nick Ut Took ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll