The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an emergency request by Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court justice who lost a Senate race in 2017 after he was accused of sexual misconduct, blocking Mr. Moore from collecting an $8.2 million defamation verdict over a campaign ad run against him in that race.
The decision kept in place a unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which in April erased a jury’s verdict that Mr. Moore had been defamed by a Democratic group’s television ad.
Mr. Moore’s request was denied by Justice Clarence Thomas, who is assigned to handle emergency applications from that region of the country.
The ruling gave no reasoning, as is typical in such emergency orders.
This is likely not the last time the Supreme Court will deal with Mr. Moore’s issue. His lawyers said Mr. Moore also planned to ask the Supreme Court to rule more permanently on the merits of his case but that they had asked for more immediate temporary emergency relief as well.
They said it was necessary to block the lower court order from going into effect while the justices consider the appeal, arguing that otherwise it might be more difficult for him ultimately to get the jury award, should he prevail in his appeal.
Mr. Moore’s legal team argued that the ad involved “a deliberate cinematic fabrication that branded Moore, falsely, as a predator of children at the most critical moment of a United States Senate race.”
Lawyers for the Democratic group that created the ad campaign responded that there was no reason for the Supreme Court to act now. They said Mr. Moore had “provided no basis” to show that he would not be able to collect the judgment even if he should eventually prevail in his appeal. The lawyers characterized his claims as “little more than his personal gripes with the well-established” legal standard for defamation.
The case before the justices focused on a long-running court battle over the 2017 campaign ad. At the time, Mr. Moore was running as the Republican nominee in a special election over an open Senate seat in Alabama. In the final weeks before the election, multiple women came forward to accuse Mr. Moore of sexual misconduct when they were young.
Mr. Moore asserted that the allegations were false and part of a political attack against his campaign.
A Democratic group, the Senate Majority PAC, ran a television ad pulling from news reports that stated that Mr. Moore had been barred from an Alabama mall “for soliciting sex from young girls” and that he had approached a girl who “was 14 and working as Santa’s helper,” according to court filings.
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The ad ran about 533 times between Nov. 27 and Dec. 6, 2017, according to court filings. Mr. Moore eventually lost the election.
Mr. Moore sued for defamation and false-light invasion of privacy in Alabama in 2019, asserting that the two claims in the campaign ad, when read together, created a false implication that he had solicited sex from a 14-year-old girl who was working as Santa’s helper.
A jury agreed with Mr. Moore and, in 2022, awarded him $8.2 million in damages. The Democratic group then appealed to the 11th Circuit, asking the appeals court to overturn the verdict.
The group argued that Mr. Moore was a public figure and that he had failed to show clear and convincing evidence that the group had published the campaign ad with “actual malice,” the standard set for defamation of public figures under the landmark 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan.
In their ruling, three federal appeals court judges found that Mr. Moore failed to produce any “clear and convincing evidence” that the Democratic group had known or “recklessly disregarded” the possibility that viewers might see the ad and think it implied that Mr. Moore had solicited sex from a 14-year-old working as Santa’s helper.
The judges examined the campaign ad frame by frame.
One frame showed an escalator in the background with a quote from one of the news articles about allegations that Mr. Moore had been barred from a local shopping mall for his behavior.
Another showed a Christmas tree with Santa in the background and a quote about allegations that he had approached a 14-year-old girl who was working as Santa’s helper.
Mr. Moore’s legal team had argued that these two frames, back to back, falsely implied that Mr. Moore had solicited sex from the teen.
The appeals court said that in fact testimony from the case included an account by a woman who had worked as Santa’s helper when she was 14 and who said that Mr. Moore had asked her on dates, as well as a mall security guard who testified that he had received complaints about Mr. Moore’s behavior toward girls at the mall. The guard testified that at one point he told Mr. Moore that he was barred from the mall.
The judges concluded that Mr. Moore’s team had failed to show actual malice and that people involved in the campaign created the ad to “amplify all of the different news articles that were coming out” and to increase public awareness of the allegations.
