President Trump early on Monday added Trevor Noah to the long list of high-profile individuals and institutions in his legal cross hairs after the comedian made a joke while hosting the Grammys about Mr. Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
But legal experts say that Mr. Trump’s threat to sue Mr. Noah, whom he called a “poor, pathetic, talentless, dope of an M.C.” on social media, has very little chance of succeeding in a courtroom.
“Trevor Noah is pretty clearly protected by the First Amendment,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “The fact that Noah was hosting the Grammys and not writing a news story in The Washington Post has constitutional significance,” he added.
Mr. Noah said on Sunday evening’s broadcast, which was aired on CBS, that Mr. Trump’s pursuit of Greenland made sense “because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton.” Though Mr. Trump had been a friend of Mr. Epstein’s until the early 2000s, there is no evidence that he visited Mr. Epstein’s private island.
People and companies are protected by the First Amendment in cases where they make baseless claims about public figures in jest, Mr. Jaffer said. The most relevant case is Hustler Magazine v. Falwell from 1988, in which the Supreme Court ruled that an advertisement published by the magazine describing the televangelist Jerry Falwell having sex with his mother in an outhouse was protected under the Constitution.
“This is obviously a joke,” Greg Lukianoff, chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said of Mr. Noah’s comment. “Nobody’s listening to this going, ‘Oh my God, this means Trump really went to Epstein’s island!’”
Mr. Trump has been successful in extracting financial settlements from major corporations even in cases when legal experts said his claims had little hope of prevailing. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, last year settled a case brought by Mr. Trump for $16 million. Other companies, including Disney and Meta, have also settled with Mr. Trump, weighing those expenses against a prolonged legal battle with the most powerful person in the world.
A spokesman for CBS had no immediate comment.
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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