Largely going under the radar for the last few years was President Trump’s defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize Board for awarding The New York Times and The Washington Post for their reporting promoting the Russian Collusion Hoax. But on February 12, Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeals affirmed the 19th Judicial Circuit’s ruling that Trump did have standing in the state and that the case could proceed.
In the order obtained by NewsBusters, Justice Jeffrey Kuntz wrote, with Justices Burton Conner and Ed Artau concurring, that the lower court was correct to apply “Florida’s long arm statue and the Due Process Clause” and that Trump “sufficiently pled that the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to defame him”:
The circuit court concluded that the exercise of personal jurisdiction over the eighteen defendants was proper. We agree. Trump’s operative pleading sufficiently pled that the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to defame him. Further, the defendants issued the website public statement in response to the requests of a Florida resident—Trump. They did so in a meeting attended remotely by a Florida resident who also conducted an editing review of the proposed website statement while in Florida.
Because Trump met the personal jurisdiction requirements of Florida’s long arm statute and the Due Process Clause, the circuit court’s order is affirmed.
Justice Artau went further with this own concurring opinion to address the Pulitzer Prize Board’s “alleged roles in conspiring to issue the defamatory statement standing by the debunked allegations that the President colluded with the Russians.”
Interestingly, Artau directly called into question the veracity of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the long-standing precedence for alleged defamation involving public figures:
In 1964, however, the Supreme Court held in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, that the First Amendment “prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with ‘actual malice’—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
But this standard wrongly applies the First Amendment because it deviates from the common law’s standard for libel at the time of the ratification of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
(…)
In fact, the common law recognized a special cause of action, known as scandalum magnatum (slander of the nobles), for “[w]ords spoken in derogation of a peer, a judge, or other great officer of the realm[.]”…This was considered “more heinous” than ordinary defamation and was “not . . . actionable in the case of a common person[.]”
But slander of the nobles did not require any heightened standard of malice to be proved… Instead, the difference between general defamation and slander of the nobles was the status of the person about whom the statement was made.
“In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court deviated from these common law principles ‘and primarily justified its constitutional rule by noting that 20th century state-court decisions and ‘the consensus of scholarly opinion apparently favor[ed] the rule,’” Artau wrote.
Additionally with this case, in late January, the Pulitzer Prize Board submitted a motion requesting a stay on the case until Trump was out of office. Their reasoning being that he’s now the president.
They looked to previous cases where Trump had asked for stays by citing the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. “Specifically, in his first term Plaintiff argued that if a case pending against him the New York state court was not ‘temporarily stayed, it will disrupt and impair [his] ability to discharge his Article II responsibilities,’” their filing argued.
But there’s a critical difference between all those cases and the current one that could make all the difference: Trump’s the plaintiff.