America descends deeper into defamation
Rudy Giuliani, left, and former President Donald Trump were recently found liable for defamation in separate legal cases. Credit: Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, AP / Alex Brandon
Defamation is, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “The act of communicating false statements about a person that injure the reputation of that person.”
The word keeps jumping out from the news. In one of his circuslike, money-driven stunts, billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of ‘X,’ formerly known as Twitter, is threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League. He’s blaming the Jewish nonprofit organization for costing him revenues by pressuring advertisers over allegedly defamatory speech on the platform. Whether the decline is due far more to Musk’s own mismanagement, or some mix of market conditions, remains to be discussed, perhaps in court.
Defamation finds wider use in the electoral sphere these days. Propagated by misinformation on social and other media, this transgression — beyond its legal implications — has become an accepted style of political argument in recent years. It’s as if historian Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” crafted in the 1960s, has morphed into a more mainstream defamatory style in electoral politics.
More and more, we see certain political players use defamations, smears or empty claims to deflect from credible allegations. The most prominent — but far from the only — example comes from the “stop the steal” canard. The seminal lie was that President Donald Trump was reelected in 2020. He was not.
To buttress this falsehood, the stalwarts apparently decided that other stories had to be made up. Long story short, Fox Corp. and Fox News in April settled a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million over false vote-rigging claims. Last week, Rudy Giuliani was found liable for defaming two Georgia election officials in the same cover-up cause.
The lies were deliberate. They have yielded some rewards. Had Trump admitted the truth about the election, the Republican Party would have acted normally — and likely would have embraced the chance to face up to why the first president in a generation was trounced in a reelection race. If that had happened, he might not be running again, collecting money in an apparent effort to shield himself from prosecution.
Smears are a weapon available across the board. Democrats and the left sometimes indulge in them as do Republicans and the right. Spreading memes that all cops of all races are the enemy has a defamatory and destructive effect. And despite the overall positives of the #MeToo movement, defamatory sexual allegations do arise.
On Wednesday, however, the defamation dynamic worked out differently in a big court case. Federal judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that Trump is liable for defamatory statements he made about writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019 when she went public with claims that he raped her decades earlier. In May, a jury found he sexually abused her. Trump said she was “totally lying” and “I know nothing about this woman. I know nothing about her. She is — it’s just a terrible thing that people can make statements like that.”
That’s the treacherous problem with trying to destroy a reputation to help your own. The tactic will pay off as long as voters fall in behind public figures who butcher facts and reputations. The fabulists know who they are, and as the years pass, so will America.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
