Trump Wins Legal Battle Over Pulitzer Prize: Defamation Lawsuit Continues

A judge in Florida has granted former President Donald Trump a legal victory by not dismissing Trump’s defamation lawsuit against a statement issued by the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding the reporting on the Trump campaign's Russia connections in 2016. The decision by Robert Pegg, a senior judge of a district court in Florida, means that Trump’s case will proceed and possibly enter a discovery phase. During this phase, Trump’s lawyers could question Pulitzer representatives who award the most prestigious prizes in journalism. The case revolves around a 2022 statement from the panel, in which it affirmed its decision to award the 2018 National Reporting Prize to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and the Trump campaign’s Russia connections. After the prize was awarded, special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated the allegations of Russian interference, stated that he could not find evidence that Trump or his associates had coordinated with the interference. Trump and others who questioned the reporting had urged the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award. However, in its 2022 statement, the board said that two independent reviews found nothing to discredit the articles. The reviews concluded that "no passages or headlines, assertions or statements in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged after publication," as the board explained in its statement. Trump sued the board in a state court in Florida over this statement, arguing that it was defamatory. The Pulitzer Prize Board's lawyers argued that the panel's statement was an opinion and not a factual claim and therefore could not be defamatory. In his decision, published online by Politico, Pegg rejected the board’s arguments. Citing legal precedents stating that a statement can be defamatory if a speaker provides insufficient factual context, Pegg declared that the board’s 2022 statement provided too little information to allow readers to assess whether the prize remained justified and whether the underlying reporting held up in retrospect. Pulitzer representatives and their lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday. In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump praised the ruling on Saturday evening. He wrote that the judge did not allow the Pulitzer Board to hide "behind the deeply outdated Times v. Sullivan case," referring to the 1964 Supreme Court decision that protects journalists and others from defamation claims by public figures. Trump has not sued The Times or The Post over their Pulitzer Prize-winning articles on his campaign's Russia connections published in 2017. His campaign unsuccessfully sued both news organizations over opinion pieces on the topic.