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Donald Trump has won a court battle in his defamation lawsuit against members and staff of the Pulitzer Prize Board, a lawsuit stemming from an award given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for stories about Russia and his 2016 campaign. The former president has alleged that board members and staff conspired to publish a defamatory statement in 2022 affirming the veracity of the newspapers’ prize-winning journalism.
The Florida state judge’s decision denied the defense motion to dismiss Trump’s complaint, which lets the case move forward.
Here’s the 2022 Pulitzer statement at issue:
The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign — submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.
These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. 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 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.
The Florida judge, Robert Pegg, found that the statement wasn’t “pure opinion” — as the defense argued — which wouldn’t be actionable by Trump. Rather, the judge said that the statement “withheld information from their audience that would have provided an adequate factual foundation for a common reader to decide whether to agree or disagree with Defendants’ decision to let 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand, and whether the awarded reporting had in fact been discredited by facts that emerged from the Mueller Report or the other government investigations that had been made public since the conferral of those prizes.”
Basically, the judge ruled that the defendants couldn’t escape the case at this stage of litigation. The bottom line for now is that Trump’s complaint survived a motion to dismiss, but whether he ultimately prevails remains to be seen.
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