Trump spokesman Jason Miller owes G/O Media, formerly Gizmodo Media Group, nearly $42,000 in legal expenses after he tried and failed to sue the company for accurately reporting on legal filings stipulating he’d secretly drugged his pregnant mistress with an abortion pill.
After losing his initial $100 million defamation suit against G/O Media—the parent company of the now-defunct Splinter, which published the story—Miller tried to revive the case by arguing that the court documents were out of bounds.
His claim was rejected by a federal appeals court that “ruled that they were protected under New York fair reporting privilege and upheld the 2019 decision.”
And last week, to add insult to injury, the former spokesperson for Donald Trump—himself no stranger to being laughed out of court—was ordered to pay $41,868 in legal fees “incurred by Defendants at both the district court and appellate court levels.”
A US District Judge has ordered Trump flack Jason Miller to pay Gizmodo nearly $42,000 to cover legal expenses from his failed $100 million defamation suit. The judge found Gizmodo accurately reported a court filing alleging Miller slipped an abortion pill into a woman’s smoothie pic.twitter.com/h7JZiPTnGm
— Roger Sollenberger found true love, suckers (@SollenbergerRC) May 22, 2021
Miller’s first lawsuit against G/O Media, home to websites like Gizmodo and Jezebel, came after Splinter reported in 2018 on court documents alleging that Miller had secretly spiked his mistress’ smoothie with an abortion pill after learning she was pregnant.
The concoction killed the unborn child and nearly caused the woman to go into a coma, the filing said. Miller lost his gig as a paid political commentator at CNN shortly after the Splinter article was published and eventually sued G/O for $100 million in damages, claiming the allegations were false.
That defamation suit was dismissed by a federal judge in 2019, who ruled that the story was “a fair and true report” of a legal filing—a finding upheld by the panel of judges on the 11th Circuit last month.
He seems to be taking that loss well:
Trump’s top political advisor Jason Miller lost $42,000 on his $100 million defamation lawsuit against Gizmodo who accurately reported court docs about him allegedly abortion pill drugging a stripper.
When I asked if losing the appeal made him aggravated he threatened to sue me. pic.twitter.com/BLvffWhvFm
— Grant Stern is fully vaccinated (@grantstern) May 23, 2021
The series of suits marks Miller’s most recent entanglement with the law, of which there are many.
Earlier this year, The Guardian reported that Miller made an arrangement to disguise his income from political strategy firm Teneo in order to dodge paying child support.
He resigned as Teneo’s managing editor in 2019, told multiple outlets that they had “parted ways by mutual consent,” and attested to a Florida court that he was now unemployed and should therefore be able to “abate and modify” his payments.
But according to the Guardian, “Previously undisclosed confidential records from inside Teneo show that on the same day Miller signed a formal ‘separation agreement and general release’…he signed a new contract with the firm, whereby Teneo agreed to secretly engage Miller as a consultant, through a hastily formed LLC, at the very same base compensation of nearly $500,000 doing the very same work.”
The ruling is a boon to G/O Media at a time when the company is looking to expand in a new direction.
According to Axios, it’s launching “a first-party data platform called G/O Veritas to sell ads against the data it collects from its 11 websites.”
The service is aimed at boosting ad revenue amid pandemic-related losses—a route Axios notes other web publishers, including Condé Nast and the New York Times, have also taken of late—and comes as the first new product from G/O Media since Great Hills Partners acquired it in 2019.
This article appears in Vanity Fair.