This makes his defamation suit against CNN all the more inexplicable. His suit was filed shortly after his controversial remarks during the first Trump impeachment trial in January of 2000. He sued CNN for $300M on the dubious claim that he was defamed by the way they described his comments. CNN had carried his comments in full, and then had him on twice in the followng days to explain them, and yet Dershowitz still sued, a horrible mistake of judgment on his part.
A trial judge granted summary judgment for CNN, finding that Dershowitz had shown no actual malice by CNN, and an appeals court upheld the judgment 3-0. Now today the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, effectively ending the suit after six years.
The only way the Supreme Court was going to hear the case is if they wanted to reexamine the 1964 Sullivan case, which held that a public figure must show acutal malice to win a defamation suit. Gorsuch and Thomas were ready to do so, but the other justices were not.
The case illustrates the importance of retaining the actual malice standard, as a lesser standard would open the door to nuisance lawsuits against media outlets whenever somebody was offended by their coverage. The rationale behind the standard is that a public figure has a better way to correct the record, which Dershowitz certainly has in light of his fame and fortune. He has deliberately courted publicity and controversy, and he cannot now plausibly claim to be harmed by innocent comments made by CNN in the course of reporting on the Trump impeachment.
I have previously written about how Dershowitz has been losing his mental faculties. Sadly, he seems to have only gotten worse in recent years.
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