Supreme Court won’t hear Trump backer’s libel case
WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear the case of a former Kentucky high school student and supporter of Donald Trump who said he’d been the victim of “cancel culture” after a video of his interaction with an elderly Native American man went viral in 2019.
The decision leaves in place a lower court’s dismissal of a massive libel lawsuit filed by Nicholas Sandmann against Gannett, the parent company of USA TODAY, and other media organizations for their coverage of the incident. Sandmann argued he was defamed by their reports on his confrontation with Native American rights activist Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial in January 2019.
A video went viral of Sandmann, then 16 and a student at Covington Catholic in northern Kentucky, standing nose-to-nose with Phillips.
Sandmann, walking in a “March for Life” event, was wearing one of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign hats and smiling at Phillips, who was beating a drum and chanting at an “Indigenous People’s March.”
The video unleashed a firestorm of social criticism that the white student’s conduct was racially motivated, which Sandmann denied and other witnesses disputed.
Sandmann filed lawsuits against eight media organizations, including the New York Times, ABC News, CBS News and Rolling Stone magazine, seeking a combined $1.25 billion for their coverage of the event, saying they had unfairly defamed him.
Trump defended Sandmann and his fellow student on Twitter, claiming they had been “smeared” with false reports by the media. In a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Sandmann accused the media of trying to “cancel” him.
However, a federal judge in Kentucky dismissed the suit in 2022. He ruled that Phillips’ statement that Sandmann “blocked him and wouldn’t allow him to retreat” – as reported by the media – was Phillips’ opinion, for which they could not be sued. The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judge’s dismissal.
In Sandmann’s unsuccessful petition to the Supreme Court, his lawyer said the case has “come to epitomize the high-water mark of the ‘cancel culture.’ ” Sandmann, his lawyer said, was transformed “from a quiet, anonymous teenager into a national social pariah, one whose embarrassed smile in response to Phillips’ aggression became a target for anger and hatred.”
That happened because of the media’s “careless failure” to investigate Phillips’ description of the encounter, his lawyer told the court.
But the suit was narrowed by the district judge to focus only on whether the quote attributed to Phillips was defamatory.
“The media defendants were covering a matter of great public interest, and they reported Phillips’s first-person view of what he experienced,” U.S. Senior Judge William Bertelsman wrote in dismissing the suit in 2022.
When Sandmann appealed to the Supreme Court, the media outlets waived their right to respond.
The Washington Post, NBC and CNN had previously settled with Sandmann.
Maureen Groppe is a USA TODAY reporter; Andrew Wolfson is a Louisville Courier Journal reporter