On Wednesday the legal team of Former President Donald Trump filed a defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize board. The suite points to a statement the board made backing the reporting of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning articles.
At the time Trump requested that the board review its decisions to award the 2018 prizes to the New York Times and Washington Post staff. This was over their reporting on the now-debunked Russia collusion narrative.
Former President Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against members of the Pulitzer Prize Board after it declined to rescind the 2018 prizes presented to @NYTimes and @WashingtonPost for their reporting on debunked 'Trump-Russia collusion' allegations. https://t.co/P8cLZdbrG9
— The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) December 15, 2022
The board honored Trump’s request and conducted the reviews. After the review was conducted the organization stood by its original choices. According to Hill’s reporting, the organization said “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.”
Trump repeatedly threatened to sue the board over its statement. However, the Former President only filed the suit on Wednesday. The amount he seeks in damages is unspecified.
“On the facts known to Defendants at the time these reviews were allegedly conducted, it would have been impossible that a single objective, thorough and independent review would have reached such a conclusion, much less two. Defendants knew this and published the Pulitzer Statement anyway,” the suit reads.
Former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board alleging defamation due to a statement the organization made after a review of previous defamation claims made by him. https://t.co/SUNDLpgc5H pic.twitter.com/eXueqavwb6
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) December 14, 2022
“A large swath of Americans had a tremendous misunderstanding of the truth at the time the Times’ and the Post’s propagation of the Russia Collusion Hoax dominated the media. Remarkably, they were rewarded for lying to the American public,” it continues.
A New York Times spokesman, Charlie Stadtlander, told The Hill in an interview that “[t]he mission and responsibility of The New York Times is to report thoroughly and impartially on matters of newsworthy importance. The foreign manipulation of the 2016 elections was both consequential and unprecedented in United States history. Our journalists thoroughly pursued credible claims, fact-checked, edited, and ultimately produced groundbreaking journalism that was proven true time and again.”
Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post is a defendant in the suit.
