A federal appeals court panel affirmed the dismissal Tuesday of President Donald Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN for using the term “the Big Lie,” calling the president’s claims “unpersuasive” and “meritless.”
“Trump has not adequately alleged the falsity of CNN’s statements. Therefore, he has failed to state a defamation claim,” wrote Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Adalberto Jordan, Kevin Newsom, and Elizabeth L. Branch, in an
eight-page filing. “Trump’s other arguments are likewise meritless.”
The term “the Big Lie” refers to Trump’s
debunked claims of sweeping election fraud that supposedly robbed him of a second term in the White House in 2020. Trump alleged when he sued the network in 2022 that CNN’s use of the term was part of a “campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander.”
He also accused CNN of using “the Big Lie” to create a “false and incendiary association” between him and Adolf Hitler, who
originally coined the term in
Mein Kampf. But the lower court ruled that “bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact.”
The panel of appeals court judges ruled that Trump’s argument was “unpersuasive,” because the term “Big Lie” did not constitute a statement of fact. “This assumption is untenable,” the judges wrote.
“Trump’s argument hinges on the fact that his own interpretation of his conduct—i.e., that he was exercising a constitutional right to identify his concerns with the integrity of elections—is true and that CNN’s interpretation—i.e., that Trump was peddling his ‘Big Lie’—is false. However, his conduct is susceptible to multiple subjective interpretations, including CNN’s,” the judges wrote.
“We have held that, by using ‘Big Lie’ to describe Trump, CNN was not publishing a false statement of fact. Therefore, whether CNN used ‘Big Lie’ one time or many is irrelevant to the question of falsity,” they added.
This is the latest of Trump’s failed lawsuits against a media company reporting on his lies. In September, a federal judge
dismissed the president’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against
The New York Times, stating it was chock full of “tedious and burdensome” language that had nothing to do with the case itself.
In July, Trump sued
The Wall Street Journal over a report linking Trump to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. That lawsuit came shortly after the Trump administration won a
$16 million settlement from Paramount for a supposedly “deceptively” edited
60 Minutes interview of failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
This story has been updated.
