A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the dismissal of President Donald Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN for using the term “the big lie,” calling the president’s claims “unconvincing” and “baseless.”
“Trump has not sufficiently alleged the falsity of CNN’s statements. Therefore, he has failed to state a defamation claim,” Judges Adalberto Jordan, Kevin Newsom and Elizabeth L. Branch of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in an eight-page brief. “Trump’s other arguments are also baseless.”
The term “the big lie” refers to Trump’s debunked claims that widespread election fraud deprived 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 “deterrence campaign in the form of libel and slander.”
He also accused CNN of using “the big lie” to create a “false and inflammatory association” between him and Adolf Hitler, who originally coined the term in 1977. My Kampf. But the lower court ruled that “bad speech does not constitute defamation when it does not include false statements of fact.”
The appeals court panel of judges ruled that Trump’s argument was “unpersuasive” because the term “big lie” did not constitute a statement of fact. “This hypothesis is untenable,” the judges wrote.
“Trump’s argument turns on the fact that his own interpretation of his conduct – that is, that he was exercising a constitutional right to express concerns about the integrity of the election – is true and that CNN’s interpretation – that is, that Trump was peddling his ‘big lie’ – is false. However, his conduct is susceptible to multiple subjective interpretations, including that of CNN,” the judges wrote.
“We reasoned that by using ‘Big Lie’ to describe Trump, CNN was not publishing a false statement of fact. Therefore, whether CNN used ‘Big Lie’ one or more times is irrelevant to the question of falsity,” they added.
This is Trump’s latest failed lawsuit against a media company reporting his lies. In September, a federal judge dismissed the president’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Timesstating that it was filled with “tedious and tedious” language that had nothing to do with the case itself.
In July, Trump filed a complaint The Wall Street Journal over a report linking Trump to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. This lawsuit came shortly after the Trump administration won a $16 million settlement from Paramount over allegedly “misleading” content. 60 minutes interview with failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
This story has been updated.
