A Florida appeals court Wednesday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to pursue a defamation lawsuit against Pulitzer Prize board members in a dispute rooted in the organization awarding a prize to The New York Times and The Washington Post for reporting about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A three-judge panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal rejected arguments that the lawsuit should be dismissed against Pulitzer board members and other people associated with the board who live outside of Florida.
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The lawsuit, which Trump filed in 2022 in Okeechobee County, contends that he was defamed by a statement posted online by the Pulitzer board. That statement came after Trump requested that the board rescind the joint 2018 award to the two newspapers.
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The board commissioned two independent reviews of the Times and Post stories and declined to rescind the award decision. The board statement, which was later posted online, said in part that the “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.”
The Pulitzer board members argued the lawsuit should be dismissed, in part, because 19 of the defendants were not Florida residents. They argued that as a result, Florida courts did not have legal “jurisdiction” over those defendants. The only other defendant was Neil Brown, president of the St. Petersburg-based Poynter Institute.
Circuit Judge Robert Pegg rejected the jurisdiction argument involving the out-of-state residents, leading the defendants to appeal. But the appeals-court panel Wednesday upheld Pegg’s decision.
“Trump’s operative pleading sufficiently pled that the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to defame him,” said Wednesday’s main opinion, written by Judge Jeffre Kuntz and joined by Judges Burton Conner and Ed Artau. “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 (Brown) who also conducted an editing review of the proposed website statement while in Florida.”
The opinion does not resolve the underlying allegations in the lawsuit.
But Artau issued a concurring opinion that referred to “now-debunked allegations that he (Trump) colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 presidential election.” Artau wrote that 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.”
“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.
In a brief filed in August, attorneys for the Pulitzer board members disputed that the statement published by the board was 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.”
Also, the attorneys argued that there “is no dispute that the members who drafted the board statement did so outside of Florida, the members who approved the board statement did so outside of Florida, the administrator who edited the board statement did so outside of Florida, and the staff member who published the board statement online did so outside of Florida. It is likewise beyond dispute that the board did not direct the board statement into Florida. Precedent is clear that, in these circumstances, the non-resident defendants are not subject to personal jurisdiction in Florida as a matter of due process.”
The Pulitzer board issued a statement after Wednesday’s ruling that vowed to continue fighting the lawsuit.
“This lawsuit is about intimidation of the press and those who support it --- and we will not be intimidated,” the statement said. “The Pulitzer Board will continue to recognize the accomplishments of journalists, writers, artists and composers at the highest level. We look forward to continuing our defense of journalism.”
Kuntz’s opinion referred to 19 members of the Pulitzer board. But the board’s brief said the 19 out-of-state defendants included board members, former board members and administrators.
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