Appeals Court Hands Roy Moore Another Loss In Yet Another Bogus Libel Lawsuit

Former judge Roy Moore made quite a name for himself while attempting to convert his sketchy judicial career into a presumably equally sketchy career as US senator. Prior to his run for office in the 2018 mid-term election, Moore had already been suspended from the Alabama bench for a long list of violations:

1. disregarding a federal injunction.
2. demonstrated unwillingness to follow clear law.
3. abuse of administrative authority.
4. substituting his judgment for the judgment of the entire Alabama Supreme Court, including failure to abstain from public comment about a pending proceeding in his own court.
5. interference with legal process and remedies in the United States District Court and/or Alabama Supreme Court related to proceedings in which Alabama probate judges were involved.
6. failure to recuse himself from pending proceedings in the Alabama Supreme Court after making public comment and placing his impartiality into question.

A normal person may have decided to recede from the public eye and head to the private sector. But because Trump was now president, Roy Moore decided his past judicial indiscretions made him a perfect GOP candidate for a contested Senate seat.

Then came the steady stream of personal indiscretions, which began shortly after Moore tossed his tainted hat into the ring. The list of sexual misconduct allegations is so voluminous it requires its own Wikipedia page.

Moore’s alleged interactions with females as young as age 14 added to the self-inflicted damage Moore had created while still an Alabama judge.

Multiple entities reported on this. Moore responded by issuing legal threats and filing lawsuits. He also sued comedian Sacha Baron Cohen over being duped into an “interview” with a supposed Israeli newscaster (Baron Cohen) who subjected Moore to a supposed “pedophile detection device” created by the Israeli Army. The “device” lit up when Moore was scanned.

Moore’s cause of action in that case was one of the best worst things I’ve ever seen:

Had Judge Moore and Mrs. Moore known that Defendant Cohen had fraudulently induced Judge Moore into this interview, which as a “set up” to harm and thus damage Plaintiffs and the rest of their entire family, Judge Moore would not have agreed to appear.

Amazing. It’s like arguing in traffic court that if you had known there would be a speed trap set up to catch speeders, you wouldn’t have been speeding when you passed through it.

Suffice to say, Roy Moore has been suing a lot and losing a lot. Somehow, his lawsuit against a political action committee (the Senate Majority PAC) survived several motions to dismiss and was handed over to a jury. This jury awarded Moore $8.2 million in damages because the ad run against Moore’s Senate campaign featured consecutive (sourced!) quotes that may have led viewers to believe he had attempted to talk a 14-year-old “Santa’s helper” into sex while working at a Gadsden, Alabama shopping mall.

While it’s true the consecutive quotes dealt with two separate sets of allegations — the first being Moore’s banishment from the mall for constantly sexually harassing female workers and the second being a separate conversation with the “Santa’s helper” — the jury decided these quotes appeared close enough to each other in the PAC’s ad to infer a connection between these two otherwise unrelated incidents.

In 2019, Moore sued the Senate Majority PAC, claiming that the group libeled him and subjected him to false light invasion of privacy by suggesting that he sought sex from a 14-year-old girl working as a “Santa’s helper” at a shopping mall in Gadsden, Alabama.

At issue was an ad aired by SMP in the closing weeks of the election that included several frames displaying quotes from the news articles about Moore’s alleged conduct. One frame quoted a New American Journal article that reported “Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden Mall . . . for soliciting sex from young girls.” An immediately subsequent frame quoting the same article read “[o]ne he approached ‘was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.’”

While that may have been enough to convince a jury to give Moore an unearned win and $8.2 million in PAC cash, the Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court says [PDF] what’s seen in the ad doesn’t actually add up to a win for Roy Moore.

First off, even Roy Moore admits the quotations used in the ad are factually direct quotes from other sources.

Here, frame 2 of SMP’s ad contained the following quote: “Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden Mall . . . for soliciting sex from young girls.” The frame included a citation for the quote, and Moore admits that this quote is an accurate excerpt from the cited article. Frame 3 contained the following language: “One he approached ‘was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.’” The frame included a citation for the direct quote, and Moore does not dispute that the directly quoted phrase—“was 14 and working as Santa’s helper”—was an accurate excerpt from the AL.com article.

Since Moore has conceded that, all he can argue is that the quotes appearing consecutively in SMP’s ads add up to SMP deliberately creating a narrative that those making the ad absolutely knew wasn’t true (the actual malice standard).

Nope, says the Eleventh:

Lastly, Moore contends that SMP must have intended or recklessly disregarded that the ad conveyed the defamatory implication because SMP vetted or fact-checked the ad before publishing it. Moore asserts that because SMP’s research team “read all of the articles” cited in the ad and attempted to ensure the ad’s accuracy, and none of the articles supported the assertion that Moore solicited a 14-year-old girl working at the mall for sex, it necessarily follows that SMP intended, or recklessly disregarded, the ad’s defamatory implication. We disagree.

Before we get to the conclusion that undoes the jury verdict, let’s pause for a moment to appreciate the fact that Moore’s argument here isn’t that he did not solicit a 14-year-old girl for sex, but that he did not solicit a 14-year-old girl for sex at this particular mall.

Given that it’s come to this, it would have made far more sense for Moore to simply maintain his innocence and hope that his GOP voting bloc would simply issue a “who among us” shrug at the long list of alleged sexual harassment. Instead, Moore’s appears to be trying to line his pockets while being forced to state things like this on the public record, which includes the “had I known I was being tricked, I never would have agreed to be tricked” detailed in the opening of this post.

Anyway, this is how it’s going for Moore:

In sum, Moore points to, and our independent review has revealed, no other evidence in the record showing that SMP intended or recklessly disregarded that its ad implied that Moore solicited sex from Miller when she was 14 and working as Santa’s helper. Because the evidence discussed above is inadequate to support a finding of the necessary intent to defame for purposes of actual malice in a defamation-by-implication case, Moore’s defamation and false-light claims necessarily fail. As a result, the jury verdict cannot stand.

Moore is still out whatever he’s paid to fail repeatedly in US courts. He can, of course, appeal this ruling. But I can’t imagine the Supreme Court cares one way or another about Moore’s attempts to enrich himself by portraying protected speech as defamation. Moore did a considerable amount of damage to his own reputation long before he started suing. Whatever reputational damage has occurred since is so incremental it’s a rounding error. It certainly isn’t $8.2 million.