Nunes v. Cable News Network, Inc.

Cable News Network, Inc. (CNN) (defendant) published an article and aired broadcasts alleging that California congressman Devin Nunes (plaintiff) traveled to Vienna to obtain derogatory information on Joe Biden. Claiming the allegations were false, Nunes sued CNN for defamation and civil conspiracy. The suit was filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia. On motion by CNN, the case was transferred to the Southern District of New York. That court considered CNN’s motion to dismiss the claims. CNN argued that dismissal was proper because California law governed and precluded a defamation claim unless the plaintiff had timely filed a request for a retraction, which Nunes had not. Because the case was originally brought in Virginia, the New York court applied Virginia’s choice-of-law rule for tort suits, lex loci delicti, to determine which state’s substantive law governed. The court concluded that in a multistate-defamation case, a Virginia court would apply the substantive law of the place where the plaintiff suffered the greatest reputational harm, which was presumptively the plaintiff’s home state. It then held that because Nunes had not rebutted the presumption, California law applied. It dismissed Nunes’s claims because the defamation claim was not viable under California law and the civil-conspiracy claim was contingent on a viable defamation claim. Nunes appealed, arguing that a Virginia court applying lex loci delicti would deem the place of the wrong to be either New York, the place from which the relevant information was allegedly disseminated, or Washington DC or Virginia, the places where Nunes conducted political business.