Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes suffers another loss in defamation suit

Source: Law & Crime

Jan 27th, 2025, 5:52 pm


A federal appeals court in Iowa handed Devin Nunes another loss in his defamation suit against journalist Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazines over a 2018 Esquire article that said the Nunes family’s dairy farm knowingly employed undocumented immigrants after a lower court judge determined that the story was “substantially, objectively true.”

A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on Monday affirmed the lower court’s ruling which granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, reasoning that the former Republican congressman-turned-Truth Social CEO and his family’s dairy farm failed to provide any evidence that the article caused monetary damage.

The former California congressman, who has waged numerous unsuccessful (so far) lawsuits over the years — perhaps most infamously against the Twitter accounts Devin Nunes’ Cow and Devin Nunes’ Mom — first filed suit against Lizza and Hearst in September 2019. The complaint alleged that Politico’s Lizza, then an independent contractor reporting for Esquire, defamed the congressman with actual malice and conspired to publish the “hit piece” headlined “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret.”

A second defamation lawsuit was filed on behalf of the dairy farm itself, NuStar Farms, Anthony Nunes Jr. and Anthony Nunes III, Devin Nunes’ father and brother, on Jan. 16, 2020. The cases were consolidated in February 2022.

Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/truth-social-ceo-devin-nunes-suffers-another-loss-in-defamation-suit-after-judge-found-it-substantially-and-objectively-true-that-his-family-farm-employed-undocumented-immigrants/