The Combs defamation claim against Nexstar Media Inc. and attorney Ariel Mitchell has survived a motion to dismiss, with Judge John P. Cronan of the Southern District of New York ruling on 4 September that the case may proceed to discovery, subject to defined limitations on which statements remain live.
The civil action, docketed as Combs v. Burgess (1:25-cv-00650, S.D.N.Y.), was filed in January 2025 and names Courtney Burgess, Mitchell, and Nexstar (the parent broadcaster of cable channel NewsNation) as defendants. Combs originally sought $50 million in damages; his amended complaint, filed seven months later, added a further $50 million, bringing the total claimed to $100 million, according to reporting by USA TODAY.
The case concerns statements made between Combs’s September 2024 federal indictment and his trial. In July 2025, a jury acquitted Combs of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking but convicted him on two counts of transportation for the purposes of prostitution, identified by Inner City Press as Counts 3 and 5. The original indictment charged three counts; prosecutors filed additional charges before trial, bringing the total to five counts, as CBS News reported. The original charges included one count of racketeering conspiracy, one count of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, and one transportation count, per a Homeland Security Investigations press release.
The Combs Defamation Claim Against Nexstar: Actual Malice at Pleading Stage
Judge Cronan’s analysis of the claims against Nexstar turned on the constitutional actual malice standard: knowing or reckless falsehood. Combs’s complaint identified seven allegedly defamatory statements; four were pleaded against Nexstar, all arising from NewsNation broadcasts of statements by Mitchell or Mitchell and Burgess jointly.
The court dismissed the Combs defamation claim against Nexstar as to three of those four statements. Combs alleged that NewsNation conducted no investigation, performed no fact-checking, and failed to contact his representatives for comment. Judge Cronan held that a failure to investigate, standing alone, is insufficient to establish reckless disregard. A publisher’s profit motive in broadcasting a story was equally unavailing: combining the two factors did not raise a plausible inference of the ‘purposeful avoidance of the truth’ that actual malice requires.
The court also rejected the argument that Mitchell’s and Burgess’s lack of credibility should have been obvious to NewsNation. An unproven accusation of witness tampering against Mitchell did not supply ‘obvious reasons’ to disbelieve everything she said, particularly where the complaint did not allege that the NewsNation staff responsible for the broadcasts actually knew of that history.
Statement 5 fared differently. Mitchell had claimed that baby oil can serve as a ‘conduit’ for drugs ‘mixed into the oil,’ and that Combs had used drug-laced baby oil to incapacitate victims. The complaint alleged there is ‘no scientific basis’ for the proposition that baby oil could be infused with drugs to incapacitate anyone. Judge Cronan found this claim so inherently improbable that broadcasting it without further investigation plausibly amounted to recklessness. He cited the California Supreme Court’s decision in Khawar v. Globe Int’l (1998), which sustained an actual malice finding against a tabloid that republished the highly improbable claim that a bystander had assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. The claim against Nexstar on Statement 5 therefore survives Rule 12(b)(6).
Mitchell’s Defences Fail Across All Six Statements
The position for Mitchell is considerably weaker. All six statements pleaded against her survive dismissal.
Mitchell argued her statements were not ‘capable of being proven true or false’ and amounted to opinion or rhetorical hyperbole. The court rejected that framing: whether a police report corroborates a rape allegation and whether a specific video exists are plainly questions of fact. Republication liability also applies, the rule that one who republishes a libel may be held liable even if attribution is given to the original source is, as Judge Cronan put it, ‘black-letter’ law.
The judicial proceedings privilege and the fair report privilege under section 74 of the New York Civil Rights Law also failed. Mitchell’s statements were made to the media rather than in a judicial proceeding, and they overstated the seriousness of any official proceeding they purported to describe.
On actual malice, the court found the pleading sufficient on the ground that the complaint alleges Mitchell repeatedly professed personal knowledge of evidence she had no basis to believe existed. She confirmed she could ‘tell that the video [of Combs] is pornographic in nature,’ despite allegedly never having possessed any such video. She announced ‘we also have a police report,’ even though it is alleged no such report exists. She claimed to have done ‘research’ on drug-laced baby oil, although she allegedly performed no such research. The court noted that Mitchell herself has contended she ‘did not even know Burgess’ at the time of her first interview, which undermines any basis for her statements during that appearance. ‘A person cannot engage in this sort of rootless speculation,’ the court concluded, ‘and then try to hide behind the shield of actual malice.’
Nexstar Media Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group, Inc. (NXST), listed on Nasdaq. NewsNation expanded to 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news programming in 2024, according to Nexstar’s most recent annual report filed with the SEC. Judge Cronan has served on the Southern District of New York bench since 2020.
The action now moves toward discovery. Mitchell’s exposure across all six statements and Nexstar’s continued liability on Statement 5 will test how far courts are prepared to hold media defendants to account for broadcasting claims that are implausible on their face.
