Donald Trump has company with being made to pay for defaming people in public….
Before the Trump era and the explosion of social media, though, such cases were virtually nonexistent.
“The new information landscape we’re in is a little bit like the Wild West — a lawless space,” said Ian Bassin, a co-founder of Protect Democracy. Lawyers, he said, have turned to defamation, which is legally defined as any false information, either published, broadcast or spoken, that harms the reputation of a person, business or organization. “It’s one of the most effective and only strategies for dealing with these out-and-out falsehoods,” Mr. Bassin said.
In the past few years, more than a dozen high-profile defamation cases have made their way through the courts. A majority have been brought against defendants on the right, but the right brings lawsuits too, often against media organizations.
In 2020 and 2021, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC settled a defamation case brought by Nick Sandmann, a Kentucky high school student, who said the outlets had wrongly described his encounter with a Native American elder as a racially tinged confrontation. Mr. Sandmann’s suit against other outlets, including The New York Times, ended last week when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Payouts have been particularly large for defamation cases against the right. In January the lawyer Roberta Kaplan defeated former President Donald J. Trump in court when a jury ordered him to pay $83 million for defaming her client, E. Jean Carroll, a writer he sexually abused. Last year lawyers from the firm Susman Godfrey secured a $787.5 million settlement for Dominion Voting Systems from Fox News, one of the biggest ever in a defamation case, after Fox aired bogus theories falsely linking the company to election fraud. In late 2022 Sandy Hook families defamed by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones won a total of nearly $1.5 billion from juries in Texas and Connecticut, though Mr. Jones has yet to pay them anything….