Last updated on August 7th, 2024 at 04:27 pm
A Florida judge has ruled that former President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board can proceed, rejecting the board’s motion to dismiss the case.
Trump is suing the Pulitzer board for defamation for a 2022 statement affirming its 2018 decision to award a Pulitzer Prize—one of the most recognizable distinctions in professional journalism—to the Washington Post and New York Times for their reporting on allegations Trump colluded with Russian government actors during the 2016 election.
Trump has disputed the veracity of the claims he colluded with the Russian government during his 2016 campaign. Special Counsel Robert Mueller ultimately concluded a two-year investigation into the Russia collusion allegations finding members of the Trump campaign interacted with individuals linked to Russia, but finding inconclusive evidence of a specific conspiracy between Trump and Russia.
The Pulitzer Prize Board received numerous requests to revisit its 2018 prize award to the Washington Post and the New York Times, including from Trump himself. In July 2022, the board issued a statement, indicating it conducted two reviews of the 20 articles that formed the basis for its prize award and concluded “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.”
Trump’s lawsuit against the Pulitzer board focuses not on the 2018 award per se but on this 2022 statement.
The defendants filed to dismiss the defamation suit. They argued their 2022 statement is “non-actionable pure opinion” to the extent that it “could reasonably read to convey and endorse the alleged implication that Trump colluded with Russia.”
Trump, by contrast, argued the statement reinforced a “false, defamatory message that he had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.” His claim also asserts that the Pulitzer board made defamatory statements by way of false implication.
Florida Circuit Court Judge Robert Pegg ruled on Saturday, July 20, that Trump had asserted actionable defamation claims.
“The United States Supreme Court has recognized that “[e]ven if the speaker states the facts upon which he bases his opinion, if those facts are either incorrect or incomplete, or if his assessment of them is erroneous, the statement may still imply a false assertion of fact,'” Pegg wrote. “‘ Simply couching such statements in terms of opinion does not dispel these implications.'”
Pegg further concluded the Pulitzer board withheld key information about the two reviews it ordered of the 2018 award, who conducted the reviews, if the reviewers had any conflicts of interest, what information the reviewers relied on for their reviews, and how the reviewers assessed claims in the numerous award-winning articles that relied on anonymous sources.
“Readers cannot meaningfully evaluate Defendants’ decision to accredit the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting when an adequate factual foundation for this decision has been withheld,” Pegg wrote.
The decision allows Trump’s defamation claims against the Pulitzer Prize to move forward.
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