Judge Rejects Bid to Dismiss Trump Libel Suit Against Pulitzer Board
A state judge in Florida has given former President Donald J. Trump a legal victory, refusing to toss a libel lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump over a statement made by the board of the Pulitzer Prizes on coverage of the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.
The ruling on Saturday by Robert Pegg, a senior judge on a circuit court in Florida, means that Mr. Trump’s case will proceed, opening the door to a discovery phase that may allow Mr. Trump’s lawyers to question Pulitzer officials, who issue the most prestigious prizes in journalism.
The case hinges on a statement made in 2022 by the panel reaffirming its decision to award the national reporting prize in 2018 to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Russian ties to the Trump campaign. After the prize was awarded, a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, investigating the Russian interference allegations, said he could find no evidence that Mr. Trump or his aides had coordinated with the interference effort.
Mr. Trump and others who disputed the reporting had urged the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award, but in its 2022 statement, the Pulitzer Prize board said two independent reviews had found nothing to discredit the articles. The reviews found 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 board said in the statement.
Mr. Trump sued the board in state court in Florida over the statement, arguing that it was defamatory. Lawyers for the Pulitzer Prize Board argued that the panel’s statement was an opinion, not a statement of fact, and thus could not be defamatory.
In his ruling, Mr. Pegg turned down the board’s arguments. Citing legal precedent that a statement may be defamatory if a speaker provides inadequate factual context, Mr. Pegg said the board’s 2022 statement provided too little information for people who read it to evaluate whether the prize should stand and whether the underlying reporting held up in retrospect.
Pulitzer officials and their lawyers did not immediately return a request for comment on Sunday.
In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday night, Mr. Trump praised the ruling. He wrote that the judge had not allowed the Pulitzer board to “hide behind the deeply outdated Times v. Sullivan case,” the Supreme Court’s decision in 1964 that protects journalists and others from defamation claims by public officials.
Mr. Trump has not sued The Times or The Post over their Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russian interference, which were published in 2017. His campaign unsuccessfully sued both news organizations over opinion pieces on the subject.
