(DCNF)—Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz warned on Newsmax Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s ongoing defamation lawsuits against major media outlets are unlikely to succeed under current U.S. legal standards.
Trump sued The New York Times for $15 billion Monday, accusing the paper of deliberately spreading “falsehoods” to damage his 2024 campaign and reputation. Appearing on “The Record with Greta Van Susteren,” Dershowitz said Trump faces an uphill legal battle because U.S. law requires him to prove not just false statements, but that they were made with “actual malice.”
“In the United States, he would have to prove not only that there were factual misstatements, not opinion, but factual misstatements, but that they were made with malice, that is, they were made with reckless disregard for the truth,” Dershowitz told host Greta Van Susteren.
While he personally believes the malice standard may be too restrictive, Dershowitz said that any meaningful change would require the Supreme Court to revisit and revise its own doctrine.
“So it’s going to be a very, very uphill fight in the United States, unless the Supreme Court begins to change its rules. Now, there are lawyers, including me, who are arguing that perhaps the malice restriction is too great, and judges shouldn’t be making decisions about malice. It should be left to the jury,” Dershowitz said. “But under existing law, it’s very uphill for a president to sue and be able to prove malice. Again, great irony, he might very well win in Great Britain.”
Trump’s lawsuit cited The New York Times’ endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris in September 2024, accusing the editorial board of painting Trump as a threat to American institutions. The lawsuit also flagged two articles published in October — one describing a “lifetime of scandals” and another warning Trump would govern like a dictator — as deliberately defamatory and malicious in tone.
Trump’s legal team said the Times and its reporters manipulated information and misrepresented facts with the goal of damaging Trump’s reputation. In response, a spokesperson for the Times dismissed the lawsuit as baseless and said the outlet would not be intimidated.
Separately, CBS and its parent company Paramount agreed to a $36 million settlement with Trump over claims that a “60 Minutes” segment had been deceptively edited. ABC News also reached a $15 million settlement in December 2024 after Trump sued the network for falsely suggesting a rape verdict against him, a statement made by George Stephanopoulos.
Additionally, the Times issued a correction Thursday for wrongly attributing an antisemitic quote to Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who had actually been criticizing the statement while reading it aloud from a third party’s post.
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