Vegas Billionaire Fails to Redefine Freedom of Press as Supreme Court Rejects Appeal 9 to 0 in Blow to Trump Monarchy

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by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:

Earlier today the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously refused to review an appeal by Billionaire Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn, who was seeking to overturn the landmark 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan which upheld the First Amendment’s protection for Freedom of the Press, stating that journalists and publications can only be sued for “libel” if they knowingly published something false with an intent to harm.

This was considered a huge blow to the Right Wing MAGA Trump Administration, as they seek to overthrow judges who rule against Trump, and also silence media sources who criticize Trump.

If they had been successful in overturning New York Times v. Sullivan, you would not be reading this article today, and Health Impact News, along with every other publisher who dares to criticize Trump, would be shut down.

TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

SCOTUS denies Trump megadonor’s bid to challenge pillar of press freedom

Aiming to overturn the landmark libel standard set in New York Times v. Sullivan, Steve Wynn argued the Associated Press didn’t investigate claims of sexual assault against him before publishing.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a challenge by Trump megadonor and casino mogul Steve Wynn that aimed to overturn a core ruling on press freedom.

Wynn, a billionaire who oversaw the construction and operation of iconic Las Vegas casinos including The Mirage, Treasure Island and the Bellagio, petitioned the high court in an effort to lower the standard needed for public figures to sue over media reports.

The 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan has allowed the media to report on public figures without the threat of costly libel suits.  A bedrock of modern libel law and one of the Supreme Court’s most significant First Amendment rulings, the landmark decision says public officials must show actual malice to prevail in a libel suit.

The high court declined to grant certiorari in the case, marking a setback for a push among conservative legal scholars and media critics to overturn Sullivan. 

Wynn sued the Associated Press in 2018 over the publication of a story about a sexual assault complaint filed against him in the 1970s. During its reporting, the AP obtained police records from two women who accused Wynn of sexual assault.

One of the women, Halina Kuta, told police that Wynn raped her in Chicago during the 1970s and that she gave birth to their daughter in a gas station bathroom. Wynn claims the AP omitted details of Kuta’s complaint that would have cast doubt on her claims. In his lawsuit, he says the article was published without fact-checking or investigating Kuta’s statements.

A trial court judge ruled that Kuta had indeed defamed Wynn — but Wynn couldn’t convince the courts that the AP unlawfully published her claims. Hence his appeal, which he says presents an ideal vehicle for the justices to overturn Sullivan.

Sullivan is not equipped to handle the world as it is today,” Wynn wrote in his petition filed before the court. “Media is no longer controlled by companies that employ legions of factcheckers before publishing an article.”

In 2018, media reports detailed dozens of claims of sexual misconduct against him.

The Wall Street Journal reported that salon and spa employees accused him of sexual harassment, coercion and indecent exposure. He also reportedly paid $7.5 million to settle a sexual assault case. These accusations led him to resign as CEO of Wynn Resorts and resulted in tens of millions of dollars in fines for the company.

Sullivan encourages individuals to libel first and question never, promising them near-absolute immunity should they do so,” he wrote.

Conservatives associated with the controversial Project 2025 — which Trump disavowed on the campaign trail but whose efforts to reshape the federal government often seem to mirror — have also called for Sullivan’s end.

“President Trump should make the case for revisiting the Sullivan ruling a more prominent and recurring part of his public rhetoric,” Carson Holloway, a Washington fellow in the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, wrote in a list of suggestions.

Trump has long railed against the media for its coverage of him, repeatedly calling outlets and reporters he did not like “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” during his first term in office.

He has heightened that rhetoric during the early months of his second term, going so far as to bar AP reporters from White House events in an effort to force the outlet to use “Gulf of America” when referring to the body of water instead of “Gulf of Mexico.” (Source.)

This is yet another sign, after Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts rebuked Trump last week for threatening to impeach judges who did not agree with him, that Trump not only does NOT have control over the Supreme Court, but that the Supreme Court is going to push back on Trump’s attempts to make his presidency a monarchy, ruled by executive orders, which is the goal of Silicon Valley Billionaires. See:

Big Tech “Far-Right” Billionaires want to Eliminate Politicians and “Democracy” as They Believe They can Run the World Better by Themselves

New York Times v. Sullivan

To understand the full scope of the New York Times v. Sullivan case from 1964, here is a summary from Wikipedia:

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled the freedom of speech protections in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution limit the ability of a public official to sue for defamation.

The decision held that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or candidate for public office, then not only must they prove the normal elements of defamation—publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party—they must also prove that the statement was made with “actual malice”, meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false.

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is frequently ranked as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the modern era.

The case began in 1960, when The New York Times published a full-page advertisement by supporters of Martin Luther King Jr. that criticized the police in Montgomery, Alabama, for their treatment of civil rights movement protesters.

The ad had several factual errors regarding the number of times King had been arrested during the protests, what song the protesters had sung, and whether students had been expelled for participating.

Based on the inaccuracies, Montgomery police commissioner L. B. Sullivan sued the Times for defamation in the local Alabama county court.

After the judge ruled that the advertisement’s inaccuracies were defamatory per se, the jury returned a verdict in favor of Sullivan and awarded him $500,000 in damages. The Times appealed first to the Supreme Court of Alabama, which affirmed the verdict, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In March 1964, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the Alabama court’s verdict violated the First Amendment. The Court reasoned that defending the principle of wide-open debate will inevitably include “vehement, caustic, and… unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

The Supreme Court’s decision, and its adoption of the actual malice standard for defamation cases by public officials, reduced the financial exposure from potential defamation claims and frustrated efforts by public officials to use these claims to suppress political criticism.

The Supreme Court has since extended Sullivan’s higher legal standard for defamation to all “public figures”. This has made it extremely difficult for a public figure to win a defamation lawsuit in the United States. (Source.)

I had to become an expert on this case back in 2014, when we started MedicalKidnap.com, and when we started reporting on the corruption in the Family Courts that routinely, until this day, kidnap children through the nation’s Foster Care and Adoption programs.

We were being threatened by judges, DA’s, and lawyers to remove articles that exposed this corruption, as we published the names and photos of these “public servants” on the government payroll funded by U.S. taxpayers who were trafficking children under the color of the law.

It took us a while to find a law firm and a media litigation attorney who did not have a conflict of interest from representing the child welfare system and the hospitals that are participating in these crimes, and was willing to represent us.

Once we found one, I then learned that due to New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, we were doing nothing illegal, and so I just stood firm and refused to comply with removing inconvenient articles that exposed this corruption.

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