Devin Nunes, the former Republican congressman and current CEO of Truth Social, has suffered another setback in his ongoing defamation suit against journalist Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazines. This follows a ruling by a federal appeals court in Iowa, which upheld a lower court decision that found a 2018 Esquire article about Nunes’s family dairy farm to be “substantially, objectively true.” The article in question claimed that the Nunes family knowingly employed undocumented immigrants, a point the court found to be well-supported by evidence.
The article, written by Lizza, sparked controversy because of Nunes’s staunch support for former President Donald Trump’s hard-line stance on illegal immigration. The article suggested that Nunes’s family farm in Tulare, California, was involved in hiring undocumented workers, despite the congressman’s political alignment with Trump’s tough immigration policies. Nunes filed the defamation suit in September 2019, alleging that the piece was a politically motivated attack that damaged his reputation and career.
The legal battle escalated when Nunes filed a second defamation suit on behalf of the farm, NuStar Farms, and his family members in January 2020. These cases were consolidated in 2022, with Nunes and his family arguing that the article was defamatory and caused significant harm to their reputation and financial well-being. They claimed that the article’s publication had damaged Nunes’s ability to raise funds and affected his re-election campaign in 2018.
However, the lower court ruled that the article was largely true. The judge pointed to evidence that suggested the Nunes family’s farm had indeed employed undocumented workers. For example, some of the documents presented by workers had expired dates, and the farm had accepted expired identification cards, a violation of the legal requirements for verifying workers’ status. This was seen as a strong indication that the farm knowingly employed individuals who were not legally in the U.S.
The appeals court affirmed this decision, rejecting Nunes’s claims that the article caused him financial harm. The court emphasized that Nunes had won his 2018 re-election campaign by a wide margin and had significantly increased his fundraising efforts after the article’s publication. In fact, Nunes raised more than double the amount of money in the two years following the article’s release compared to the two years before, indicating that the article did not have the negative impact on his career that he had alleged.
The court also found that Nunes had not provided sufficient evidence to show that the article harmed his employment prospects. After retiring from Congress, Nunes became the CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group, securing a starting salary of $750,000. The court noted that Nunes himself admitted that his new job was largely the result of his reputation as a former congressman, not the result of any damage caused by the Esquire article.
Similarly, the court dismissed the claims made by the Nunes family’s farm. The farm failed to present any convincing evidence of financial loss or reputational damage. The plaintiffs argued that one unnamed individual stopped doing business with the farm due to the article, but the court found this assertion to be insufficient to prove actual harm. There was no evidence that the farm had a strong reputation prior to the article’s publication, and no proof that the alleged business relationship had even existed in the first place.
In conclusion, the court ruled that Nunes and his family had failed to demonstrate that the Esquire article had caused any significant harm, either financially or reputationally. As a result, the defamation lawsuits were dismissed, and Nunes’s attempts to prove that the article was false or damaging were unsuccessful.
