A Florida court threw out the defamation case against former Dominion employee Eric Coomer on Tuesday, ending a lawsuit that began in Colorado and later moved to Florida. Coomer filed the action on June 24, 2022, in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado. The case was transferred to a Florida court in January 2024. The order’s bottom line was blunt: “The Court Is Ordered to Terminate Deadlines… And Close This Case.” Legal paperwork is rarely known for dramatic entrances or exits, so that sentence does most of the heavy lifting.
Both Byrne and Coomer filed motions for summary judgment, and their arguments cited Colorado and Florida law. According to the decision, the key difference between the states’ laws concerned defamation claims involving matters of public concern. Under Colorado law, a plaintiff must prove actual malice even when the plaintiff is not a public figure, and that proof must meet the clear-and-convincing-evidence standard.
The court laid out the basic elements of a defamation claim: a defamatory statement concerning the plaintiff, publication to a third party, fault amounting to at least negligence, and either actionability without special damages or actual special damages. Actual malice is a much more demanding test. It requires evidence that the defendant knew a statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was false. As the court explained, the question is not whether “a reasonably prudent [person] would have published, or would have investigated before publishing,” but whether the defendant “in fact entertained serious doubts as to the truth of [the] publication, or was highly aware of its probable falsity[.]”
That distinction matters. Coomer had to prove actual malice by clear and convincing evidence, a burden the court described as “heavy,” “daunting,” a “high standard of proof,” and “significantly more onerous” than the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard. At the summary-judgment stage, the question was whether a reasonable jury could find actual malice under that heightened standard. In other words, this was not a contest over whether someone could have investigated more carefully. The court focused on what Byrne actually believed.
Coomer asserted that Byrne believed the 2020 election was rigged immediately after the election. Byrne testified that he believed Oltmann’s story and remained highly confident that its gist was true. The court noted that Byrne’s statements about his own beliefs were not automatically decisive, but Coomer could try to prove Byrne’s subjective lack of belief through circumstantial evidence. That is a very different assignment from asking what an imaginary perfectly cautious person might have done. The law demanded evidence of Byrne’s actual state of mind.
The decision also pointed to a recent order granting summary judgment to The Washington Post in a defamation case brought by Trump Media & Technology Group. The court said defamation plaintiffs face two significant hurdles: proving actual malice and proving it with clear and convincing evidence. Both standards are difficult to meet, particularly when the plaintiff must show that a defendant actually knew a statement was false or seriously doubted its truth. For Coomer, those hurdles proved fatal. The Florida court’s ruling closes the case, leaving the courtroom to do what courtrooms occasionally do best, end a long argument with paperwork.
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