The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz in his defamation lawsuit against CNN. Dershowitz had argued that the network’s coverage of his remarks defending Donald Trump during the president’s first Senate impeachment trial in 2020 was misleading and damaging to his reputation.

Background of the Case

Dershowitz, a retired Harvard Law professor, was a member of Trump’s defense team during the impeachment trial. He had written a book in 2018 arguing against impeaching Trump. The charges against Trump arose from his attempts to pressure Ukraine to announce an investigation of his Democratic political rival Joe Biden, who went on to defeat Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

CNN reported that Dershowitz said during Trump’s trial, ‘if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in an impeachment.’ Quid pro quo is a Latin term meaning a favor for a favor. Dershowitz claimed that this was only part of his remarks and that CNN repeatedly aired that particular clip to make it seem as if he was ‘a constitutional scholar and intellectual who had lost his mind.’

Legal Precedent

The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case leaves in place a lower court’s ruling that threw out Dershowitz’s lawsuit. The lower court found that Dershowitz presented no evidence that CNN’s reporters and commentators operated with actual malice, a standard set by the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan. In Sullivan and subsequent decisions, the Supreme Court said that to win a libel suit, a public figure must demonstrate the offending statement was made with ‘actual malice,’ meaning with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard as to whether it was false.

Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have signaled interest in revisiting the Sullivan precedent, citing a rapidly changing media environment rife with disinformation. However, the Supreme Court has turned away opportunities to examine Sullivan in recent years, including a 2021 denial that drew dissents from Thomas and Gorsuch.

Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.