Matt Taibbi Defamation Lawsuits: Higgins and Kamlager-Dove Dismissed

Matt Taibbi’s two defamation lawsuits both ended in dismissal. A federal judge in Manhattan threw out his libel suit against journalist Eoin Higgins and publisher Hachette in May 2026, ruling that the challenged passages in Higgins’s book Owned were protected opinion and rhetorical hyperbole rather than false statements of fact. A month later, a federal judge in New Jersey dismissed his $10 million suit against Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove, holding that a federal statute substituted the United States as the defendant and that the government cannot be sued for defamation.

The Suit Against Eoin Higgins and Hachette

Taibbi filed the first case on November 13, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.¹ The target was Higgins’s book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, published in February 2025, which argues that figures including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen used money and platform access to pull formerly left-leaning writers, chiefly Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, into alignment with the right.²

Taibbi’s amended complaint identified eleven statements. Among them: the title words “Owned” and “Bought”; a reference to a “decades-long journey … into the snug patronage of billionaires”; the label “crony”; promotional copy calling the book “a biting exposé of journalistic greed”; and passages saying Taibbi had chosen to “cash in,” “launder” Musk’s “cherry-picked corporate opposition file,” reaped a “financial windfall” from Substack, and “fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power late in 2022.”³⁴

Why Judge Daniels Dismissed the Case

Senior Judge George B. Daniels granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss on May 5, 2026, after oral argument in March.³ Defamation requires a provably false statement of fact. Judge Daniels found that none of the challenged passages qualified.

Words like “Owned” and “Bought,” he wrote, are “susceptible to both literal and metaphorical meanings” and, in context, function as “attention-grabbing rhetoric” expressing the author’s subjective conclusions rather than verifiable claims of financial transactions.⁴ “Snug patronage” lacked “a readily understood precise meaning.” “Crony” was “nonactionable rhetorical hyperbole.” Descriptions of Taibbi’s motives as “greed” or his subscriber growth as a “windfall” were subjective assessments, not facts.³

Taibbi also argued defamation by implication: that even if each individual statement was protected, the book as a whole falsely implied he had been literally paid off by billionaires. The court rejected that theory. It found Taibbi had not made the “rigorous showing” required to prove the defendants intended or endorsed such an inference, noted that Taibbi himself conceded the book contained no evidence of direct payments, and pointed out that Higgins’s own contemporaneous statements distanced the work from the very implication Taibbi complained of.³ Promotional lines such as “follows the money” and “names names” were held not to be “of and concerning” Taibbi specifically, since they described the author’s investigative approach across the whole book.⁴ Judgment was entered on May 6, 2026.¹

The Pending Fees Motion

On May 20, 2026, Higgins and Hachette moved for $178,732.50 in attorney’s fees under New York’s anti-SLAPP statute, based on 312.90 billable hours. Taibbi’s counsel opposed the request as excessive on June 2, 2026.⁵ Whether New York’s anti-SLAPP fee-shifting provision applies in federal court remains unsettled, though recent Southern District decisions have trended toward treating it as substantive and therefore available in diversity cases.⁶ As of the last docket activity in June 2026, the motion was still pending, and Taibbi had not filed a notice of appeal from the dismissal.¹

The Suit Against Representative Kamlager-Dove

Taibbi filed the second case on April 3, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, seeking $10 million from Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a California Democrat.⁷ Two days earlier, at an April 1 hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South and Central Asia titled “Censorship Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department,” Kamlager-Dove, the ranking member, used her opening statement to describe Taibbi, who was appearing as a witness, as a “serial sexual harasser.”⁸

She then posted video of the remarks to X, BlueSky, and her official House.gov site, adding: “After this, Republicans gave Matt Taibbi time to defend himself. It’s telling that he didn’t.”⁹ Taibbi’s complaint focused on those republications, arguing that pushing the remarks out to social media stepped outside the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause protection.⁷ He maintained no woman had ever accused him of sexual harassment and that the label was “demonstrably false.”⁸

Why the Westfall Act Ended the Case

On June 8, 2026, Judge Evelyn Padin dismissed the suit without ever reaching the question of whether the harasser label was true or false. The ruling turned on the Westfall Act. That statute directs that when a federal employee is sued for a tort committed within the scope of their employment, the United States is substituted as the defendant. The Department of Justice, through attorney Stephen Terrell, certified that Kamlager-Dove’s hearing statement and her subsequent social media posts fell within her official duties.⁸

Judge Padin agreed. Communicating with constituents, she reasoned, is “a central part of the job for members of Congress,” who “routinely engage with the public on social media and on the internet as part of their jobs.” Once the United States replaced Kamlager-Dove as the defendant, the claim collapsed: the Federal Tort Claims Act, which sets the terms of when the government can be sued, expressly excludes defamation from its waiver of sovereign immunity. The court separately noted that the Speech or Debate Clause independently shielded the remarks made at the hearing itself, though that clause would not have covered the social media posts on its own.⁸

Why Taibbi Was in the Line of Fire

Both suits trace back to the “Twitter Files,” the internal Twitter documents Elon Musk shared with Taibbi and several other journalists in late 2022 after acquiring the company. Taibbi published his findings on his Substack, Racket News, and the reporting fueled significant attention and subscriber growth.

Taibbi went on to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on March 9, 2023, and again on November 30, 2023, on government involvement in social media moderation.¹⁰¹¹ That public profile made him the central subject of Higgins’s book and the target of Kamlager-Dove’s remarks at the April 2025 hearing. As of mid-2026, Taibbi continues to run Racket News on Substack.¹²

1
CourtListener. Taibbi v. Higgins, No. 1:25-cv-09511
2
Chicago Tribune. Biblioracle: Eoin Higgins, Owned
3
Reason (The Volokh Conspiracy). Court Dismisses Matt Taibbi’s Defamation Lawsuit Over Owned
4
Techdirt. Matt Taibbi Loses His Vexatious SLAPP Suit as Judge Explains What a Metaphor Means
5
Inner City Press. SDNY Daniels Taibbi Higgins Attorney Fees
6
Eoin Higgins Substack. Yes, I’m Suing Matt Taibbi
7
National Review. Matt Taibbi Files $10 Million Libel Lawsuit Against Democratic Congresswoman
8
Reason (The Volokh Conspiracy). Author Matt Taibbi’s Libel Claim Over House Member’s Social Media Posts Dismissed
9
Racket News. A Response to a Member of Congress
10
House Judiciary Committee. Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government: The Twitter Files
11
House Judiciary Committee. Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government
12
Racket News. About Racket News