The US supreme court has turned down a request by former Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz to revive a $300m defamation lawsuit filed against CNN over the network’s coverage of remarks he made while defending Donald Trump during one of the president’s first-term impeachments.
In a notice on Monday, the majority declined to take up the constitutional law attorney’s case in a brief, unexplained order that left in place the legal standards for public figures who claim defamation. Conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented on the decision, calling on the supreme court to reconsider those standards.
Dershowitz, 87, sued CNN in 2020, alleging that the outlet slandered and libeled him through its editing of a comment he made to the Senate while defending Trump during one of his impeachment trials.
He claimed the revision made it falsely appear that he “had lost his mind”.
The lawsuit centered around a question by US senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, over whether an allegation that Trump wanted to trade Ukrainian political favors in return for US military aid could be considered grounds for convicting the president at his impeachment trial and removing him from office.
Dershowitz responded: “The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were somehow illegal.”
He said that CNN only played an ensuing remark to Cruz: “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest – and, mostly, they are right. Your election is in the public interest, and if the president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
Dershowitz contended that by playing the second comment, CNN made it appear that he was arguing a president could avoid impeachment for illegal acts as long as he believed his re-election was in the nation’s best interest.
He said that notion was “preposterous and foolish on its face” – and that it falsely painted him “as a constitutional scholar and intellect who has lost his mind”. He also claimed that CNN had engaged in “a deliberate scheme to defraud its own audience” at his expense.
A lower court tossed out Dershowitz’s lawsuit, finding that he had not shown CNN acted with “actual malice” in its reporting. That court found Dershowitz therefore fell short of the standard set by New York Times Co v Sullivan in 1964 that made it harder for public figures to win libel lawsuits because it requires proof that an outlet knowing published something false – or showed a reckless disregard for the truth.
In his appeal, Dershowitz had urged the court to reconsider Times v Sullivan, saying the case had “morphed into an impregnable fortress that protects media irresponsibility while denying public figures any remedy for egregious misrepresentations”.
Lawyers for the news outlet argued that the 1964 ruling is a “cornerstone of modern constitutional law” – and overruling it would do lasting damage.
CNN’s lawyers wrote that the actual-malice standard is “a pillar of modern” law related to the free speech rights guaranteed by the first amendment of the US constitution, which are “necessary for self-determination in a democratic society while still ensuring effective recourse for public-official and public-figure plaintiffs”.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
