Judge’s ruling means defamation case is moving forward.
A court in Florida has rejected a bid from members of the Pulitzer Prize Board to throw out a case brought against them by former President Donald Trump.
The board’s statement in 2022 standing behind its awards to several news outlets for reporting on former President Trump’s purported links to Russia is actionable because it is not merely opinion, Florida Circuit Court Judge Robert Pegg ruled on July 20.
Defendants withheld valuable information from readers, including the process by which complaints against the awards were evaluated, according to the judge.
In the July 18, 2022, statement, the board said that it “carefully reviewed” complaints against the awards, which were given in 2018 to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
“Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other,” the board said at the time. “The separate 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 brief statement, though, was not pure opinion because the board failed to identify any of the reviewers, reveal whether the reviewers had any connection to the board, and share the reviewers’ qualifications, Judge Pegg said.
“If the defendants’ statement had included the foregoing facts, an ordinary reader might have been able to evaluate whether they agreed with defendants’ decision not to revoke the prizes, and whether the underlying reporting had actually survived the factual disclosures of several subsequent government investigations unscathed,” the judge wrote. “Instead, the alleged defamatory statement implies no fewer than seven undisclosed sets of foundational facts, making the defendants’ statement actionable mixed opinion.”
Under Florida law, people cannot sue over pure opinion.
The board did not respond to a request for comment.
