The Republican from California said that the Esquire stories on his Iowa farm were an effort to discredit him.
In federal court in Iowa, former U.S. Representative Devin Nunes lost his case against Esquire magazine for publishing pieces on his family’s dairy farm in Iowa that he claimed injured his image.
U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams agreed with Esquire reporter Ryan Lizza and the magazine’s owner, Hearst Magazines, on Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by Nunes, as reported by the Des Moines Register.
Truth Social, the social media network maintained by Trump’s campaign group, is now managed by former California legislator Devin Nunes.
After Lizza published her 2018 article on Nunes and his family’s dairy farm in northwest Iowa, Nunes responded by filing the lawsuits the following year. The story goes that the family uprooted their life in California and relocated to Iowa. The study also asked if any illegal aliens were working on dairy farms in Iowa.
Williams said in his decision that a fair trial jury would not find the article’s claims of defamation.
This is the second lawsuit that Nunes has lost in court. Williams once again dismissed Nunes’ claims in 2020, but Nunes appealed. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals declared in 2021 that Lizza may have committed new defamation by simply tweeting a link to the initial story in November of 2019.
Williams ruled again, this time saying that the article’s statements that the Nunes family hired foreign people were consistent with the evidence. The court ruled that the family’s proof wasn’t strong enough to refute the story.
Nunes did not immediately respond to a message left on his website.
Although she did not immediately respond to an email, Lizza is presently employed at Politico. Even Esquire magazine took too long to reply to my email.