Why a Florida appeals court is allowing Trump’s lawsuit against the Pulitzer board to proceed

13 February

Donald Trump with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2019 (Creative Commons)

An appeals court in Florida has allowed President Donald Trump to move forward with a defamation lawsuit against members of the Pulitzer Prize board on Wednesday, the Miami Herald reported. The case pertains to the Pulitzer Prize jointly given to the New York Times and the Washington Post for reporting on potential Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“Trump’s operative pleading sufficiently pled that the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to defame him,” wrote a three-judge panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal.

The lawsuit, filed in 2022, alleges that the Pulitzer board defamed Trump in an online statement in response to Trump’s request that the board rescind the Times and Post’s 2018 award. In January, the board asked the court to pause the lawsuit until after Trump leaves office.

In their decision, the judges also addressed the lawyers’ argument that all members of the board drafted the statement except one that lives outside of Florida, so they were not subject to personal Florida jurisdiction. “Further,” the judges write, “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 [board member Neil Brown] who also conducted an editing review of the proposed website statement while in Florida.”

"Today’s ruling is an unequivocal victory for President Trump in his pursuit of justice against the Pulitzer Prize board members for their dishonest and defamatory conduct. President Trump is committed to holding those who traffic in fake news, lies and smears to account and he looks forward to seeing his powerful cases through to a just conclusion," Quincy Bird, attorney for President Trump, told Fox News.

Trump “has met his burden of establishing jurisdiction to proceed with his asserted claims that the non-resident defendants acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth by knowingly conspiring with the Florida resident defendant to defame the president by publishing the statement,” Judge Ed Artau wrote in a concurring opinion.

“Therefore, the trial court correctly denied the non-resident defendants’ motion to dismiss the President’s claims over the asserted publication of defamatory ‘FAKE NEWS,’” Artau wrote.

“The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed,” the board wrote in the statement in question. “In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign -- submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.”

“These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” they continue.

“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand,” they wrote.

The Pulitzer board’s attorneys wrote in August that the board's statement was not defamatory. “The board statement asserts that the award-winning articles ‘on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign’ do not contain any ‘passages or headlines, contentions or assertions’ that have been ‘discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.’ That statement is not defamatory because it does not reasonably convey the implication that Trump colluded with Russia, nor does it signal that the board affirmatively endorsed that implication,” the brief said.

“Moreover, even if the board statement conveyed that implication, it discloses all the facts — set out in the articles themselves — on which that conclusion would be based, rendering the board statement a nonactionable ‘pure opinion.’ The board statement thus does not amount to a ‘tortious act’ and the non-resident defendants are not subject to personal jurisdiction in Florida,” they wrote.

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