The Supreme Court shut down former Republican National Committee (RNC) finance chairman Steve Wynn’s bid to overturn a precedent protecting press freedoms Monday.
The justices declined to hear an appeal by the billionaire to revisit the landmark 1964 ruling of the case New York Times v. Sullivan by using a defamation suit he had filed against the AP in 2018, in which he accused them of falsely alleging that he had engaged in sexual misconduct with two women in the 70s.
“Sullivan is not equipped to handle the world as it is today,” Wynn wrote in a petition filed before the court.
“In this age of clickbait journalism, even those members of the legacy media have resorted to libelous headlines and false reports to generate views,” Wynn’s attorney wrote in the petition. “This Court need not further this golden era of lies,”
The Sullivan ruling required that in order to win a libel suit against a newspaper and journalist, a public figure must prove “actual malice,” meaning that a statement had to have been made “with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.”
The Trump administration and members of its inner circle have been tirelessly trying to overturn this six-decade old libel law in order to make it easier to sue the press.
In 2023, a federal judge dismissed Trump’s $475 million defamation suit against CNN, in which he argued that the network’s description of his claims of election fraud as the “big lie” was associating him with Adolf Hitler.
“The court should reconsider whether Sullivan’s standard truly protects the democratic values embodied by the First Amendment, or, instead, facilitates the pollution of the ‘stream of information about public officials and public affairs’ with false information,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
In 2021, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch also urged the Supreme Court to revisit the landmark case, Thomas then dissenting from the court’s refusal to do so in 2022.
“This case is one of many showing how The New York Times and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity,’” Thomas wrote.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018 that dozens of employees had accused the former CEO of Wynn Resorts of sexual misconduct.
That same year, the Nevada Supreme Court dismissed his defamation suit against the AP. Wynn has denied these allegations.
Thomas did not publicly dissent when the court declined Wynn’s appeal Monday. The AP has also waived its right to respond to the court filing.
