US Supreme Court turns away casino mogul Wynn's bid to challenge NY Times v. Sullivan defamation rule

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court turned away on Monday a bid by casino mogul Steve Wynn to roll back defamation protections established in its landmark 1964 ruling in the case New York Times v. Sullivan - a standard that has been questioned by President Donald Trump and two of its own conservative justices.

The justices declined to hear an appeal by Wynn, former CEO of Wynn Resorts ( WYNN ), of a decision by Nevada's top court to dismiss his defamation suit against the Associated Press and one of its journalists under a state law meant to safeguard the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections for freedom of speech. 

The Supreme Court in its New York Times v. Sullivan ruling and subsequent decisions set a standard that in order to win a libel suit, a public figure must demonstrate the offending statement was made with "actual malice," meaning with knowledge it was false or with reckless disregard as to whether it was false. That standard has since been adopted in a number of state laws across the country, including in Nevada.

Lawyers for Wynn expressed regret that the justices declined to take up the appeal.

"The fact that media outlets are free to publish demonstrably false stories turns the First Amendment on its head," his lawyers said in a statement.

Wynn, the former finance chair of the Republican National Committee, filed a defamation lawsuit in 2018 accusing the AP news wire and the journalist of publishing an article falsely alleging he committed sexual assault in the 1970s. 

Those claims first appeared in two separate complaints filed with police that an AP reporter obtained from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. One of the complaints, Wynn argued, was implausible on its face. A Nevada court in a separate proceeding found that complaint to have included "clearly fanciful or delusional" allegations. 

Wynn has denied the sexual assault allegations.

Nevada's top court found that Wynn failed to show that a disputed 2018 AP report containing allegations of sexual assault had been published with "actual malice." 

Wynn in his appeal had asked the justices to assess "whether this court should overturn Sullivan's actual-malice standard," as well as a related prior court decision. Wynn also had asked the court to assess whether state laws like Nevada's that impose the standard of "actual malice" at a preliminary stage of legal proceedings violate the Constitution's Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

The Supreme Court in recent years has turned away opportunities to revisit New York Times v. Sullivan, including a 2021 denial that drew dissents from Thomas and Gorsuch, who are members of its 6-3 conservative majority.

Citing a rapidly changing media environment increasingly rife with disinformation, Thomas and Gorsuch wrote separately that the court should take a fresh look at its precedents that make it harder for public figures to win defamation cases.

Since launching his first Republican presidential campaign in 2015, Trump has often attacked and even sued media outlets whose coverage he dislikes, and has criticized American defamation laws as too protective of the news media. 

Trump for years has been fiercely critical of the news media, sometimes calling reports he does not like "fake news" and referring to the press as "the enemy of the American people." Since beginning his second term as president in January, he has limited the access of some news outlets in coverage of the White House and other parts of the U.S. government such as the Pentagon.

A federal judge in 2023 threw out Trump's $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN in which he had claimed the news network's description of his false claims of 2020 election fraud as the "big lie" associated him with Adolf Hitler. Trump's lawyers, in a 2022 filing in that case, had invited the judge to reconsider the legal standard set in New York Times v. Sullivan.

"The court should reconsider whether Sullivan's standard truly protects the democratic values embodied by the First Amendment, or, instead, facilitates the pollution of the 'stream of information about public officials and public affairs' with false information," Trump's lawyers wrote.

(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)