The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz’s defamation lawsuit against CNN after the famed attorney asked the high court to upend a landmark defamation law ruling.
The justices turned away his appeal of a lower court’s ruling that tossed his case against CNN, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. In his appeal after lower courts struck down his petition, Dershowitz had urged the justices to roll back protections against defamation claims that the Supreme Court established in a landmark 1964 ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan.
The court declined to hear the case and did not provide reasoning why. However, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch disagreed with the decision, with Thomas writing a dissent saying he would challenge the “actual malice” doctrine that was set up in the 1964 case, effectively establishing that there must be evidence showing a news organization was intentionally trying to defame a public figure before that individual can sue for defamation.
“The ‘actual malice’ standard for public figures ‘bears ‘no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution,’” Thomas wrote in the dissent, adding, “Instead, the founding generation believed that, if anything, public figures had stronger claims for damages when they were defamed.”
Dershowitz, who represented multiple high-profile defendants as a defense attorney, argued in a petition submitted before the high court that the 1964 ruling has become “an impregnable fortress that protects media irresponsibility while denying public figures any remedy for egregious misrepresentations.”
CNN, he alleged, misreported comments that he made during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial in the Senate regarding the grounds on which a president can be impeached in the House.
“This case illustrates the problem: Dershowitz made a carefully qualified statement on the Senate floor,” the petition said. “It was recorded for all to see and hear. Yet CNN systematically stripped away his calibrating statements and attributed to him a fundamentally different message.”
Dershowitz was a member of Trump’s defense team in the Senate impeachment trial in 2020 held after the House of Representatives passed articles of impeachment accusing Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Dershowitz also had written a 2018 book arguing against impeaching Trump.
In the suit, Dershowitz asserted that a comment he made about quid pro quo, which is Latin for “favor for a favor,” in the Senate was only a portion of the remarks that he gave during the trial.
CNN had reported that Dershowitz said during Trump’s impeachment trial, “If a 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 an impeachment.”
He argued that CNN repeatedly aired the clip in a bid to defame him, also citing an email exchange between CNN’s John Berman and his producer to show there was actual malice involved. CNN also did not air his entire statement during the impeachment trial about quid pro quo, he said, arguing the network took it out of context.
Arguing against Dershowitz’s claims, CNN’s attorneys said that the Sullivan ruling applies in the case and said that weakening it would create significant damage to the defamation law precedent.
CNN’s lawyers also said in a filing that it aired Dershowitz’s full remarks and interviewed him on air twice after he criticized the network’s coverage.
Dershowitz had appealed a decision handed down by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that last year ruled he failed to prove whether any statements made by CNN about his impeachment trial remarks were knowingly done so to damage his reputation.
Reuters contributed to this report.
