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Matt Damon, Ben Affleck sued by Miami police for depicting them as ‘dirty’ in The Rip
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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And with public figures there's also the actual malice requirement, which requires the defendant to have evidence they were telling a lie and, or have shown so little interest in checking the facts that the only reasonable explanation is they were actively avoiding the truth.
This sounds like a description of Faux News.
That's true. But I'm not sure your average cop in Miami counts as a public figure for the purposes of defamation.
But the "Miami police department" does, and these character saren't named as specific individuals. Only the police department. The police department is certainly, itself, a "public figure", which the defendants could easily demonstrate using the public figure's social media posts and press releases. Is there case law saying that a group such as a corporation cannot constitute a "public figure"?
And this is especially the case for such an iconic police department. The Miami PD is up there with the NYPD, the Chicago PD, and the LAPD as default "we want to do a police story" departments. There are other major cities where maybe you could claim they aren't as public of figures, the Cleveland PD or Portland PD would leave the audience asking why them unless there's something to it, and even more so for smaller cities like Eugene, OR or Akron, OH. But "I want to do a story about crooked cops" leaves Miami as one of the cliche settings.
I mean, yeah, one of the more famous police procedurals is literally "Miami vice".
That's fair. A case could be made as such for sure. I'm not aware of any case law for our against that assertion.