• by Ray Schultz , January 27, 2025

Esquire magazine and its owner Hearst have won a key victory in the $77 million defamation suit filed against them by former Congressman Devin Nunes. 

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that the U.S. District Court in Iowa was correct in dismissing the case. 

Nunes sued for defamation in 2019 over an article by Ryan Lizza titled “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret.” 

This article “implicitly accused Nunes and his family of conspiring to hide the fact that NuStar Farms employed undocumented labor,” writes Judge Steven Colloton, chief judge of the appeals court panel. 

The Nunes family company NuStar sued in 2020, and the two cases were combined. The new filing focused on defamation by implication, a claim that the appeals court sent back to the district court for further argument. 

Ultimately, that court ruled that “Nunes and the NuStar plaintiffs each failed to create a genuine dispute of material fact on certain elements of their defamation claims,” Colloton states.

The appeals court also rejected the claim of “special damages,” those involving material loss. 

“Nunes prevailed in his re-election campaign of 2018 and thus has not shown damage to his ability to secure re-election,” Colloton adds. “He also has not presented sufficient evidence that his ability to raise funds was diminished as a result of the article.”  

The opinion continues, “While he claims that two to three dozen companies declined to give money to his campaign, he produced no evidence to support this assertion—not even the names of the alleged companies.”

In addition, “Nunes did not produce evidence that he sought any particular position or present evidence of employment opportunities that were available to other former Members of Congress who were similarly situated," the Colloton writes.  

Indeed, after Nunes retired from Congress, he became “the chief executive officer of Trump Media & Technology Group, Corp., with a starting salary of $750,000,” based on his reputation. 

Similarly, NuStar failed to prove its business suffered economic harm after the article appeared. 

“They claim that one person stopped doing business with NuStar Farms as a result of the article. But the NuStar plaintiffs failed to produce evidence that the suggested business relationship existed, let alone that the other party discontinued the association,” Colloton observes. This bare assertion of lost business is insufficient to establish a cognizable injury.” 

It was not known at deadline if the Nunes side is planning another appeal.