MONTGOMERY, Ala. (Legal Newsline) - An Alabama federal judge has refused to dismiss a defamation brought by border control advocacy group deemed a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Judge W. Keith Watkins on April 24 explained his reasoning in a lengthy ruling for allowing the case to proceed past SPLC's motion to dismiss. The issues before him, he wrote, were more appropriate for adjudication at the summary judgment phase.
The decision allows Donald King and his Dustin Inman Society to proceed.
"The cumulative allegations raise a plausible inference that, while SPLC had thoroughly investigated DIS over the years and concluded that it did not meet SPLC's definition of an anti-immigrant hate group, it had a 'high degree of awareness' that is designation of DIS as a hate group was probably false, or at the very least, that SPLC must have 'entertained serious doubts as to the truth of [its] publication," Watkins wrote.
SPLC publishes a list of hate groups on an annual basis and changed its tune on DIS, which was founded in 2005, in 2018.
"What did change is that on March 1, 2018, Defendant SPLC registered lobbyists to work against a pro-enforcement bill pending in the Georgia General Assembly," the suit says. Georgia is DIS's home state.
"While Defendant SPLC goes on to state that it does not place this classification on individuals, the published reports focus almost exclusively on allegations regarding Plaintiff King to support the designation as an 'anti-immigrant hate group,'" the suit adds.
"In none of the defamatory material published by Defendant SPLC does it allege that Plaintiff King or Plaintiff DIS maligned an entire class of people or at any time fit any part of the Defendant SPLC's own definition of 'anti-immigrant hate group.'"
Statements made by King and DIS were taken out of context, the suit says.