Donald Trump Jr. on Monday landed a victory in an almost five-year-old defamation lawsuit brought against him by former West Virginia coal executive Don Blankenship.
Mr. Blankenship served one year in jail for a misdemeanor safety law violation related to a 2010 explosion at a coal mine that killed 29 miners. In 2019, he waged a series of legal battles on a slew of individuals, media outlets, and the Republican Party’s Senate campaign wing for referring to his penalty as a felony.
The suits were filed following his unsuccessful 2018 campaign for the Republican nomination to run for the Senate seat held by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. Attributing the defeat to unfavorable media coverage, Mr. Blankenship claimed that there was an organized defamation effort to portray him as a “felon,” despite the fact that he was cleared of the felony charges and was only convicted of the misdemeanor offense.
Last March, U.S. District Judge John Copenhaver ruled in favor of Mr. Trump Jr., who reposted on Twitter—now called X—a CNN article discussing Sen. Joe Manchin’s re-election campaign with a comment saying, “He’s probably never run against a felon.” The ruling held that Mr. Blankenship didn’t bring “clear and convincing” evidence to show that Mr. Trump Jr. acted with actual malice rather than a mere lack of knowledge.
In a decision handed down on Monday, a panel of federal appellate judges upheld Judge Copenhaver’s decision, unanimously finding that Mr. Blankenship failed to introduce enough evidence that Mr. Trump Jr. knew that he had erred in calling him a “felon.”
Supreme Court Turns Away Defamation Claim Against News Outlets
Monday’s ruling comes after Mr. Blankenship’s failed bid to have the U.S. Supreme Court overturn a landmark decision that set a high bar for public figures to win defamation claims against the press.
Mr. Blankenship’s defamation lawsuit was targeting some of the country’s biggest news organizations—the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and The Washington Post, to name a few. In February 2022, Judge Copenhaver dismissed the lawsuit, holding that there wasn’t enough evidence that could “reasonably convince a jury” that the media outlets did act with malice.
In his appeal to the nation’s highest court, Mr. Blankenship asked the justices to reevaluate the ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan. Now a bedrock of the U.S. media law, the 1964 ruling concluded that a public figure must prove that a defamatory statement was made with “actual malice”—that is, “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
Last October, the Supreme Court justices turned him down in a one-sentence order without explanation. Justice Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, penned a separate concurring opinion arguing that the court should consider overturning the 1964 decision.
“I continue to adhere to my view that we should reconsider the actual malice standard,” Justice Thomas wrote. However, he noted that Mr. Blankenship’s case might not be an ideal one in which to consider the issue, since West Virginia law applies the same actual-malice standard on public figures pursuing defamation claims.
Justice Neil Gorsuch has also suggested that the precedent should be overturned. In a 2021 opinion, Justice Gorsuch argued that the actual-malice doctrine was made for a society where there were fewer, but more credible, outlets “employing legions of investigative reporters, editors and fact-checkers.”
“What started in 1964 with a decision to tolerate the occasional falsehood to ensure robust reporting by a comparative handful of print and broadcast outlets has evolved into an ironclad subsidy for the publication of falsehoods by means and on a scale previously unimaginable,” he wrote.
