ED MORRISSEY: Elon to ‘Fire Pull’ Bowman: Get Ready for a 4-Alarm Lawsuit.
JUST IN: Elon Musk announces he is launching a lawsuit after former Rep. Jamaal Bowman called him a “thief” and a “Nazi” on live television.
The comment from Bowman came last night on CNN.
“I've had enough. Lawsuit inbound,” Musk said in response to the video clip below. pic.twitter.com/QUpdPFdUPn
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 22, 2025
Is stupidity a defense against defamation? Perhaps, and although [Jamaal] Bowman is a former public-school principal, his attorneys can point to a number of Bowman’s statement and actions to depict him as a pure-D moron, including and especially the fire-pull incident. A better defense, especially in light of Musk’s clear status as a ‘public person’ under the Sullivan standard, is that “Nazi” is a hyperbolic statement of disapproval that was not meant to be taken literally.
Unfortunately, both defenses would tend to get defeated by a statement Bowman made at the time of the fire-pull incident. At the time, Bowman attempted to get his fellow Democrats to adopt a set of talking points to defend him for faking a fire alarm, with Politico reporting at the time that one suggested response would be to call Republicans Nazis:
One suggested response from Bowman’s office to questions about the incident: “I believe Congressman Bowman when he says this was an accident. Republicans need to instead focus their energy on the Nazi members of their party before anything else.”
Bowman then claimed that his staffers had created the bullet points and hadn’t asked him for approval before sending it out. He then released a statement explaining why it was inappropriate:
I just became aware that in our messaging guidance, there was inappropriate use of the term Nazi without my consent. I condemn the use of the term Nazi out of its precise definition. It is important to specify the term Nazi to refer to members of the Nazi party & neo-Nazis. https://t.co/DUi92VpUia
— Congressman Jamaal Bowman (@RepBowman) October 2, 2023
So Bowman is on record stating that he only intends to use “Nazi” in its “precise definition,” and explicitly condemned it as a term for a broad political attack. That certainly would lead one to believe that Bowman intentionally and fraudulently applied it to Musk for the express purpose of defamation.
That certainly seems … actionable. As well as incompetent.
Anyway, Musk will still have a tough time getting around Sullivan and the court’s normal tolerance of hyperbole in political criticism. Normally, one might wonder whether a plaintiff in this situation would want to waste the resources on such a fight, but Musk has an awful lot of resources.
Related: “I’m not suggesting Elon Musk took my advice when I said he should consider suing Jamaal Bowman, but I’m not denying it either.”