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.
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.
The 1964 New York Times Company v. Sullivan ruling, handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, found that people who bring defamation cases must show that defendants knew the questioned statements were false or that the defendants were reckless in publishing the statements without looking into their accuracy.
The case in Florida, being adjudicated in the 19th Judicial Circuit in Okeechobee County, concerns the board’s awarding of the 2018 Pulitzer for national reporting to The New York Times and The Washington Post for stories about purported links between President Trump and his campaign and Russia.
The stories, which largely relied on anonymous sources, included one article discussing the FBI’s willingness to pay the author of a dossier funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that consisted of a series of memorandums compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele and another about comments from an aide for the Trump campaign that spurred the FBI’s Russia investigation.
Complaints from former President Trump’s campaign and others prompted the board’s 2022 statement, which then triggered the legal case.
In a second ruling released over the weekend, Judge Pegg rejected a motion from defendants in the defamation case requesting that they be dismissed because they reside outside of Florida.
The judge said that the former president had successfully alleged conspiracy among the defendants and that at least one of the defendants may have committed tortious acts in Florida to further the conspiracy.
