The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a bid by former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore to collect an $8.2 million defamation award stemming from a Democratic campaign ad that ran during his unsuccessful 2017 Senate bid.
Moore, 79, had asked the court to stay an April ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that reversed a federal jury’s 2022 finding against the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC.
Justice Clarence Thomas declined Moore’s emergency application without explanation, as is common in such cases.
Moore, best known for his hard-line stance against same-sex marriage and support for displaying the Ten Commandments on federal property, was the Republican nominee in a special election to replace Jeff Sessions, who resigned from the Senate in February 2017 to become President Trump’s first attorney general.
Despite Trump’s backing in a state he won by 28 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election, Moore narrowly lost to Democrat Doug Jones after three women alleged that the judge had sexually assaulted them, with two women saying the encounters took place while they were underage.
The ad that triggered Moore’s lawsuit recounted some of the accusations against him, with the Republican’s attorneys arguing it falsely implied he solicited sex from young girls at a shopping mall through a combination of statements and partial quotes from news articles.
The advertisement began with: “What do people who know Roy Moore say?” It followed with the statements “Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden mall … for soliciting sex from young girls” and “One he approached was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.”
The woman, Wendy Miller, has previously testified that she met Moore when she was 14 and working as a Santa’s helper at the local mall. She recalled that Moore told her she was pretty, asked her where she went to high school and offered to buy her a soda. He asked her out two years later, but her mother told her she could not go.
Crucially, Miller testified that while Moore was probably flirting with her at their initial meeting, he did not solicit sex.
The appeals court found the Senate Majority PAC had made a “negligent error at best,” but Moore had not proven it had acted with actual malice.
The PAC had cited a sworn statement from J.D. Thomas, a Gadsden, Ala. police officer who moonlighted as a mall security guard in the late 1970s, that he told Moore not to return after receiving complaints from store managers that Moore was asking out teen employees or making them uncomfortable. Moore maintained he was never banned from the shopping center.
“Senate Majority PAC ran an advertisement that cited accurate reporting from major national news outlets detailing the women who bravely came forward with allegations about Moore’s inappropriate conduct,” attorney Ezra Reese said following the appeals court decision, arguing that Democrats “told Alabama voters the truth” and “voters correctly decided that they did not want a disgusting creep like Roy Moore representing them in the United States Senate.”
Jones served out the remainder of Sessions’ term before being defeated in the 2020 election by former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville.
With Post wires
