On Monday, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke made headlines when he announced at a campaign event that a billionaire was going to file a lawsuit against him. Sure enough, a defamation lawsuit against O’Rourke was filed in San Saba County later that day.

The man bringing the lawsuit against O’Rourke is Kelcy Warren, the co-founder and current Chairman of the Board of Directors at Energy Transfer Partners, one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world. His lawsuit is seeking damages against O’Rourke for defamation, slander, and libel.....

“There have to be very clear misstatements of fact, if there are merely opinions, generally speaking, they are not going to be actionable as defamation,” said Shavin. The standard of the law applies even further to a public official, according to Shavin. “It’s not enough just to prove it’s false or defamatory, it’s got to be proven that it was made with actual malice.”....

Shavin pointed to a Texas case to describe the very high bar for meeting defamation: Carr v. Brasher. In that case, the Texas Supreme Court denied rehearing a case from Lynn Brasher, the former mayor of South Houston, against his election opponent (and new mayor) Al Thiel and Walter Carr, a campaign aide who authored campaign brochures. Brasher alleged that Carr committed libel for some of those campaign brochures for an election in 1985. Some of the allegations raised in those brochures included “payoffs” Brasher made to bookkeepers. The defense for Thiel and Carr rested on the absence of “malice” in the accusation.