Late Friday night, a federal judge in Florida tossed a lawsuit in which former President Donald Trump argued that CNN had defamed him by labeling his stolen-election fantasy "the Big Lie." A few days earlier in a different defamation case, Rudy Giuliani, who as Trump's lawyer helped propagate the claim that systematic fraud delivered the White House to Joe Biden, belatedly admitted that he had falsely and repeatedly accused two Georgia election workers of participating in that imaginary conspiracy.
Whatever you think of the notion that people have a right to protect their reputations in court, the conjunction of those two developments starkly illustrates the difference between use and abuse of defamation law as it currently stands. Trump has a long, astonishingly petty history of filing (or threatening to file) frivolous defamation claims against critics who irk him, and his CNN lawsuit was dismissed for an entirely predictable reason: He failed to allege that the channel had published verifiably false statements of fact about him. In the lawsuit against Giuliani, by contrast, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss (who are mother and daughter) plausibly allege that he defamed them by publicly claiming they had deliberately introduced and processed thousands of phony Biden ballots.
