Pulitzer Prize board members have gone to the Florida Supreme Court as they seek to halt a defamation lawsuit that President Donald Trump filed after the board refused to rescind a 2018 award to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Lawyers for the board want the Supreme Court to review a May 28 decision by the state’s 4th District Court of Appeal that denied a request for a stay of the lawsuit, according to documents posted Tuesday on the Supreme Court website.
An initial notice, as is common, does not detail arguments that the board will make at the Supreme Court.
But the dispute is part of a lawsuit that Trump filed in 2022 in Okeechobee County contending he was defamed by a statement posted online by the Pulitzer board. That statement came after Trump requested that the board rescind the joint 2018 award to the two newspapers for reporting about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Pulitzer board commissioned two independent reviews of the Times and Post stories and declined to rescind the award decision, according to court documents. The disputed board statement, which was later posted online, said in part that the “reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”
A panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal in February refused to dismiss the lawsuit against Pulitzer board members and other people associated with the board who live outside of Florida. The board members then sought a stay of the lawsuit while Trump is the sitting president.
But in the May 28 decision, the South Florida appeals court rejected the request, pointing to the fact that Trump had not sought to put the case on hold.
“When the president is a willing participant, courts do not risk improperly interfering with the essential functioning of government,” the appeals-court decision said. “The president — by virtue of his exceptional position — is uniquely equipped to determine how to use his time, to assess the attention a lawsuit will require, and to decide whether the lawsuit will divert him from his official business. When an officeholder chooses to initiate litigation, courts must assume the officeholder already has weighed the burdens on their official duties.”
After the ruling, a spokesperson for the Pulitzer board issued a statement pushing back and alluding to Trump’s attempts to invoke immunity from litigation in other circumstances.
“Allowing this case to proceed facilitates President Trump’s use of state courts as both a sword and a shield — allowing him to seek retribution against anyone he chooses in state court while simultaneously claiming immunity for himself whenever convenient,” the statement said. “The Pulitzer board is evaluating next steps and will continue our defense of journalism and First Amendment rights.”
–Jim Saunders, News Service of Florida
