Defamation

Just when you thought American political discourse couldn’t possibly sink any lower, along comes Laura Loomer’s deposition in her defamation of character case against Bill Maher. Last year, Maher made a joke/spread a rumor/talked trash about Loomer having sexual relations with Donald Trump (the comic used the F-word). Loomer filed suit – and somehow that suit has made it to the deposition stage. Cockburn feels a bit soiled at having read the whole 226-page document, but you can say this about Laura Loomer: She’s never dull. Loomer claims she’s never been in room alone with Donald Trump, much less had sex with him, and that all of her contacts with him occur via text messages to his aides.

ABC News will pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle a defamation case the president-elect filed against the media outlet after one of its star anchors made false statements about him. This past March, anchor George Stephanopoulos repeatedly stated on air that Trump was “found liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll civil case during an interview with Representative Nancy Mace. Stephanopoulos said, “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape” when asking Mace, a sexual assault survivor, if she had misgivings about Trump’s alleged abuse of women. A jury in the E. Jean Carroll case explicitly rejected the woman’s claims that Trump had raped her, instead reaching the conclusion that he had sexually abused her.

Dominion did not lose three-quarters of a billion dollars from Fox's alleged defamation. It’s unlikely they actually lost very much at all; indeed they probably gained considerable credibility and additional business. This was especially so since the judge made findings favorable to Dominion’s professionalism. Had the case gone to verdict, and had Fox lost, the network probably would have been required to pay a relatively small amount of damages — certainly nothing approaching the amount for which they settled. Moreover there was a substantial chance that Fox could have won this suit, either at trial or on appeal. Dominion had a heavy burden to demonstrate that Fox was guilty of actual malice, that is, a reckless disregard for the truth.

Donald Trump is suing CNN for $475 million for defamation, claiming the network associated him with Adolf Hitler and portrayed him as a Russian lackey. E. Jean Carroll is in turn suing Trump for defamation in connection with him allegedly raping her. Mike “MyPillow” Lindell is being sued for $1.3 billion for defamation in connection with remarks he made about the 2020 presidential election being false. And way outside politics in America, a foreign English teacher in Thailand faces two years in jail for defamation over a negative online review of a resort he stayed at. What is defamation? Why is it so hard to prove in the United States but relatively easy to prove in most other countries?

Cockburn has witnessed a lot of legal screw-ups in his day (and has been apart of several himself!), but revelations in the Alex Jones defamation trial have taken it to a new level. In a surprise twist while Alex Jones was on the stand, it was revealed that Jones's attorneys had accidentally sent the entire contents of the Infowars chief's phone to the Sandy Hook parents' attorney. A startled Alex Jones seemed taken aback when emails he claimed didn't exist appeared on a screen in front of the court room, with the Sandy Hook attorney asking, "You know what perjury is?" https://twitter.com/acyn/status/1554875445253812225?

While Cockburn is loath to be anywhere that does not serve brandy, he made an exception for the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard verdict, which was handed down in Fairfax, Virginia, on Wednesday. On a sunny, hot, sweltering afternoon, Cockburn took a bus from his hometown of Washington, DC. Cue the driver furiously shaking him awake and kicking him to the curb, right in front of the courthouse. Since it was only 1 p.m., there was little to see aside from the various news crews circling the entrance like vultures. As much as Cockburn was hoping for something out of a Hunter S. Thompson article, what he got was more like a city council meeting. At around 1:30, news broke that a verdict had been reached, and that it would be announced at 3. At that point, the crowd began growing.

Normally Cockburn regards himself as well above the mere paparazzi — or at least too dissolute to properly operate a camera. But he happily made an exception on Wednesday to catch the verdict in the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial, held at the Fairfax County Courthouse just outside his native Washington, DC. It was the region's most captivating trial of an unstable blonde since the Clinton impeachment. And sure enough, the jury found that Heard had defamed Depp, and that Depp had defamed Heard. Yet while Depp was awarded $15 million, Heard was only awarded $2 million, all of it in compensatory as opposed to punitive damages. It's a win for Depp, and Cockburn will have much more to come from the courthouse.

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is taking the New York Times Company (NYT) to trial in February for alleged defamation. Palin, according to her lawsuit, filed suit in order “to hold…NYT accountable for defaming her by falsely asserting what they knew to be false: that Governor Palin was clearly and directly responsible for inciting a mass shooting at a political event in January 2011.” Palin is alleging that NYT “falsely stated as a matter of fact to millions of people that Gov. Palin incited Jared Loughner’s January 8, 2011, mass shooting at a political event in Tucson, Arizona, during which he shot thirteen people, severely wounding United States congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and killing six others.