Commentary
In order to win a defamation lawsuit, the person suing must convince the court and ultimately the jury that the slanderer didn’t just publish something false, but that he did so even while suspecting that the attack was false.
Immigration enforcement activist D.A. King’s lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center made it to the discovery process while so many other lawsuits have failed precisely because King showed that the SPLC had reason to doubt the truth of its claim that his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, was an “anti-immigrant hate group.” In fact, the SPLC had explicitly stated that the society was not a “hate group” in 2011, but it reversed course in 2018, right after registering a lobbyist to oppose a bill the society supported….