Pulitzer Prize Board Appeals to Florida’s Supreme Court To Stop Trump’s Lawsuit Over New York Times and Washington Post’s Russia Reporting

Pulitzer Prize board members have gone to the Florida Supreme Court as they seek to halt a defamation lawsuit that President Donald Trump filed after the board refused to rescind a 2018 award to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Lawyers for the board want the Supreme Court to review a May 28 decision by the state’s 4th District Court of Appeal that denied a request for a stay of the lawsuit, according to documents posted Tuesday on the Supreme Court website.

The dispute is part of a lawsuit that Trump filed in 2022 in Okeechobee County contending he was defamed by a statement posted online by the Pulitzer board. That statement came after Trump requested that the board rescind the joint 2018 award to the two newspapers for reporting about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The Pulitzer board commissioned two independent reviews of the Times and Post stories and declined to rescind the award decision, according to court documents.

The disputed board statement, which was later posted online, said in part that the “reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”

After the ruling, a spokesperson for the Pulitzer board issued a statement pushing back and alluding to Trump’s attempts to invoke immunity from litigation in other circumstances.

“Allowing this case to proceed facilitates President Trump’s use of state courts as both a sword and a shield — allowing him to seek retribution against anyone he chooses in state court while simultaneously claiming immunity for himself whenever convenient," the statement said. "The Pulitzer board is evaluating next steps and will continue our defense of journalism and First Amendment rights.”