Do you remember Roy Moore? He was the Republican nominee in the special election to fill the Alabama Senate seat Jeff Sessions vacated when he became Attorney General. You may also remember the wave of news coverage reporting allegations that several women had accused Moore of inappropriate sexual conduct when they were young.
Moore later sued a political action committee (Senate Majority PAC) over a political ad that quoted and juxtaposed some of those reports. A jury sided with Moore, finding the ad defamatory and awarding him $8.2 million in compensatory damages.
But Moore will not be collecting a penny. In an opinion issued Friday, the Eleventh Circuit held that the trial court should have granted judgment as a matter of law to Senate Majority PAC. The issue was not simply whether the ad could be read to imply something defamatory (the Court said it could). The problem for Moore was that, because he was a public figure, he had to prove that the PAC acted with “actual malice." The court found the evidence lacking on that front, emphasizing, among other things, that the ad quoted and cited existing news reports and that the PAC had a fact-checking process before publication.
It's just the latest case applying the NY Times v. Sullivan standard, a standard that's come under fire recently from judges in our circuit (both district and appellate). The panel in the case again acknowledged the criticism of the Sullivan standard in a footnote, writing that "unless and until the Supreme Court decides to revisit the actual malice standard, we must continue to apply it."
You can read the opinion here.
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