McKee v. Cosby
The Supreme Court declined to hear Kathrine McKee's appeal of a ruling that labeled her a 'limited-purpose public figure,' a status that required her to meet a very high legal bar to win her defamation lawsuit over a letter written on behalf of Bill Cosby.
Justice Thomas agreed the Court was right not to take up that narrow, fact-specific question, but wrote separately to argue that in a future case the Court should reconsider the decades-old constitutional rule that makes it extremely hard for public figures to win defamation suits at all.
How it got here: A federal trial court dismissed McKee's defamation suit; the First Circuit affirmed, holding she was a limited-purpose public figure; she asked the Supreme Court to review that classification, and certiorari was denied.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Kathrine McKee publicly accused Bill Cosby of raping her decades earlier. She claims Cosby's attorney retaliated by writing and leaking a letter that falsely attacked her honesty and background to damage her reputation. McKee sued for defamation, but courts found that by speaking to a reporter she had become a "limited-purpose public figure," requiring her to prove the letter was written with actual malice, which she could not do.
The question before the Court
Should the Supreme Court have reviewed the ruling that Kathrine McKee was a "public figure" who had to prove actual malice to win her defamation suit over Bill Cosby's attorney's letter?
Why it matters
McKee's case is over, and the tough legal standard she faced to sue over the letter remains in place. More broadly, Thomas's opinion signals that at least one justice wants to revisit the rule protecting speakers from defamation liability toward public figures, a rule that shapes how the media and others can write about public figures, including sexual-assault accusers, without facing lawsuits.
What changes now
The denial of certiorari ends McKee's case, leaving the lower court's ruling against her in place. Because Thomas's writing is a solo statement respecting the denial of certiorari, it does not change any existing law on its own. It does, however, signal interest in revisiting the New York Times v. Sullivan actual-malice standard if a future case presents a better opportunity.
What this does not decide
This opinion does not overturn or change any defamation law. The Court simply declined to review McKee's specific public-figure classification, and Thomas's writing is a personal call to reconsider precedent in a future case, not a ruling that alters existing First Amendment doctrine.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
“New York Times and the Court's decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”Thomas's core criticism of the actual-malice defamation standard's constitutional pedigree.
Thomas agreed the Court was right to deny review of McKee's fact-bound public-figure classification, but wrote separately to argue that the Court should, in an appropriate future case, reconsider whether the Constitution actually requires the actual-malice standard for public figures in defamation suits. He contended the rule was invented through policy balancing rather than grounded in the First and Fourteenth Amendments' original meaning, and reviewed common-law and historical evidence suggesting public figures traditionally faced no heightened burden in defamation suits.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Justice Thomas explained that under the actual-malice rule from New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 case, public figures cannot win a defamation suit unless they prove the speaker knew a statement was false or recklessly disregarded its truth, a standard he called 'almost impossible' to meet.
- He argued this rule was not derived from the original meaning of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but was instead a policy-driven balancing test the Court invented and imposed on the states without grounding in constitutional text or history.
- Reviewing common-law defamation practice at the time the Amendments were ratified, he found that public figures were not required to meet any heightened standard to recover damages, and that libeling a public official was often treated as more serious than an ordinary libel, not less.
- He examined the historical evidence New York Times relied on, mainly opposition to the 1798 Sedition Act, and concluded it supported only a narrow point about criticizing the federal government, not a sweeping constitutional rule governing private defamation suits between individuals.
- Because the historical record did not support treating the actual-malice rule as constitutionally required, Thomas concluded the Court should reconsider these precedents in an appropriate future case, even though he agreed McKee's fact-bound classification issue was not the right vehicle for doing so.