by Jonathan Turley at Jonathan Turley
Former President Donald Trump is suing CNN in a $475 million defamation lawsuit, according to a complaint filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida on Monday. The lawsuit faces significant challenges under the governing precedent for public figures. For counsel, those challenges likely seem steeper in a week when Trump unleashed reckless and offensive attacks on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and his wife former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao as well as journalist, Maggie Haberman. It is not exactly the context that counsel would want when seeking to hold CNN liable for defamatory comments in a difficult legal action.
Even without these inflammatory and personal attacks, Trump faces a very steep hill to climb in a defamation case. As a public figure, he is subject to the standard created in New York Times v. Sullivan, where the Supreme Court held that the first amendment requires breathing space for free speech in criticizing public officials. Accordingly, it established an “actual malice” standard requiring a showing that a false statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” That standard was later extended to not just public officials but public figures.
As president, Trump denounced the standard and called for its removal — a move that I criticized at the time. While I have questioned the need for a public figure standard (as opposed to a public official standard), I have noted that Trump has been a beneficiary of this rule — as this week’s personal attacks demonstrates.
Trump has brought a series of rejected defamation actions, including against CNN.
Here is the nut of the complaint:…
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