Supreme Court rejects Roy Moore's push to restore $8.2 million defamation verdict awarded to him

The U. S. Supreme Court has ended Roy Moore's effort to bring back an $8. 2 million jury award he won over a political attack ad. The justices refused to take up his appeal, which leaves intact an 11th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that wiped out the verdict. Senate Majority PAC, the Democratic-aligned group that paid for the spot and maintained it was truthful, came away the winner. The refusal follows the court's June denial of Moore's emergency request to pause the appeals court's decision while his appeal moved forward, according to PBS NewsHour.

Moore, a former Alabama chief justice, sued over a television ad that Highway 31, a group funded by the PAC, ran during the 2017 Senate race in Alabama. His lawyers said the spot stitched together fragments of separate news stories so that viewers would think he had been accused of seeking sex from young girls at a shopping mall. They described it as a "fabricated accusation," and said it aired 533 times near the end of the campaign. A federal jury sided with him in 2022.

Summarized by PolitiKool from PBS NewsHour’s reporting. Read the full story at PBS NewsHour →