Roy Moore takes fight over $8.2 million defamation award to US Supreme Court
The case involves television ads that run during Moore's campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2017.
Mason Reed 
Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has escalated his legal battle, petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in a long-standing defamation case originating from his 2017 special Senate campaign.
The high-stakes legal fight centers on television advertisements aired by the Senate Majority PAC during that heated election cycle. In 2022, a federal jury initially sided with Moore, ruling that the political action committee had defamed him and awarding him $8.2 million in damages.
However, the momentum shifted this past April when the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the verdict. The appellate court concluded that Moore failed to meet the rigorous "actual malice" standard required for defamation cases involving public figures—a legal threshold famously set by the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan ruling.
The Emergency Appeal
Moore’s attorney, Jeffrey Wittenbrink, filed an emergency application for a stay on Friday. According to SCOTUS blog, the move aims to block the district court from issuing a mandate that would formally enact the appellate ruling and release the bond currently in place to secure the $8.2 million verdict.
The application for a stay is now in the hands of Justice Clarence Thomas, who oversees the 11th Circuit. To date, Justice Thomas has not ordered the Senate Majority PAC to provide a response.
Contentious Claims
At the heart of the dispute is the content of the PAC’s advertising. Wittenbrink argues that the ads went beyond reporting existing news, claiming they were a "maliciously false misrepresentation" of accounts published by the Washington Post and other outlets regarding Moore’s time as a prosecutor in Etowah County.
"The ad fused separate reports and cut and added language into a single accusation that Moore had solicited sex from a fourteen-year-old Santa’s helper and had been banned from the mall for doing so," Wittenbrink stated in his filing. "That was the lie."
Conversely, the Senate Majority PAC maintains that the ads were based on verifiable reporting. Upon the appellate court’s ruling in April, attorney Ezra Reese called the decision a "total vindication," asserting that the PAC simply cited accurate reporting from major outlets regarding allegations of inappropriate conduct.
Legal History
The 2017 Senate race, which Moore ultimately lost to Doug Jones, was marked by intense public scrutiny. This specific defamation case follows other legal clashes in the former judge's career, including a 2022 trial where a Montgomery County jury ruled that neither Moore nor his accuser, Leah Corfman, had defamed the other.
As Moore awaits a decision on his request to stay the lower court's ruling, his legal team continues to prepare a petition for a writ of certiorari, seeking a formal review of the case by the nation's highest court.
