Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has lost his $300 million defamation lawsuit against three media outlets.
U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled Thursday that Arpaio failed to prove CNN, HuffPost, and Rolling Stone acted with malice.
“Mr. Arpaio has failed to articulate any facts of actual malice (against any group of defendants) sufficient to withstand … a motion to dismiss,” Lamberth wrote in his opinion.
“Mr. Arpaio’s complaint does not come close to adequately pleading facts of actual malice. The complaint makes only two attempts to explain why defendants acted with actual malice. … Allegations of ‘leftist enmity’ cannot trump the guarantees of the First Amendment. Accordingly, the court will grant defendants’ motions to dismiss,” he said.
Arpaio filed the suit in December against CNN and its president Jeff Zucker and anchor Chris Cuomo, HuffPost and its political reporter Kevin Robillard, and Rolling Stone magazine and staff writer Tessa Stuart.
He alleged CNN defamed him when Cuomo referred to him as a “convicted felon” in a Jan. 10, 2018 broadcast. Cuomo corrected the statement shortly after, but CNN did not include Cuomo’s correction when it posted the clip online. The lawsuit also listed a Nov. 5 article from Robillard published by HuffPost, which said the former sheriff had been “sent to prison for contempt of court.” The news outlet corrected the mistake within two days.
Stuart, in a Rolling Stone piece from Nov. 13, referred to Arpaio as an “ex-felon.” Within hours of the story’s publication, the descriptor was changed to “presidential pardonee” and added an editor’s note with an apology for the mistake.
In his dismissal of the case, Lamberth also scolded the media outlets for the errors.
“Nothing in this opinion should be understood to be an endorsement of defendants’ errors. The court is especially bothered by the conduct of the Rolling Stone and HuffPost defendants, whose errors were not even substantially true,” Lamberth wrote.
“Mistakes, honest ones or otherwise, often cause much harm to public figures like Mr. Arpaio and diminish voters’ abilities to impartially weigh the issues that affect them,” he said. “Later corrections or even apologies of untruths rarely correct the original harm caused. But the courts ultimately must vigorously protect the First Amendment rights of journalists and the press to issue their reports, unless there is some evidence of actual malice attributable to them. Unfortunately, Mr. Arpaio has failed to meet his burden here.”
President Trump pardoned Arpaio, 87, in August 2017, sparing the former Arizona sheriff from a jail sentence after he was convicted of criminal contempt for ignoring a court order that said he could not detain immigrants only because they lacked legal status. Arpaio denied doing so intentionally, but a judge rejected his argument.
Arpaio announced in August he was running for his old position. He lost his reelection bid for sheriff in 2016 following the contempt of court charge. He then ran for Senate to replace then-outgoing Sen. Jeff Flake in 2018, but ultimately lost to Martha McSally in the primary.
