Justice Souter

delivered the opinion of the Court.

Liability under § 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U. S. C. § 1, requires a “contract, combination ... , or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce.” The question in this putative class action is whether a § 1 complaint can survive a motion to dismiss when it alleges that major telecommunications providers engaged in certain parallel conduct unfavorable to *549competition, absent some factual context suggesting agreement, as distinct from identical, independent action. We hold that such a complaint should be dismissed.

I

The upshot of the 1984 divestiture of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company’s (AT&T) local telephone business was a system of regional service monopolies (variously called “Regional Bell Operating Companies,” “Baby Bells,” or “Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers” (ILECs)), and a separate, competitive market for long-distance service from which the ILECs were excluded. More than a decade later, Congress withdrew approval of the ILECs’ monopolies by enacting the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (1996 Act), 110 Stat. 56, which “fundamentally restructure[d] local telephone markets” and “subjected] [ILECs] to a host of duties intended to facilitate market entry.” AT&T Corp. v. Iowa Utilities Bd., 525 U. S. 366, 371 (1999). In recompense, the 1996 Act set conditions for authorizing ILECs to enter the long-distance market. See 47 U. S. C. §271.

“Central to the [new] scheme [was each ILEC’s] obligation ... to share its network with competitors,” Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP, 540 U. S. 398, 402 (2004), which came to be known as “competitive local exchange carriers” (CLECs), Pet. for Cert. 6, n. 1. A CLEC could make use of an ILEC’s network in any of three ways: by (1) “purchasing] local telephone services at wholesale rates for resale to end users,” (2) “leasing] elements of the [ILEC’s] network ‘on an unbundled basis,’ ” or (3) “interconnecting] its own facilities with the [ILEC’s] network.” Iowa Utilities Bd., supra, at 371 (quoting 47 U. S. C. § 251(c)). Owing to the “considerable expense and effort” required to make unbundled network elements available to rivals at wholesale prices, Trinko, supra, at 410, the ILECs vigorously litigated the scope of the sharing obligation imposed by the 1996 Act, with the result that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) three times *550revised its regulations to narrow the range of network elements to be shared with the CLECs. See Covad Communications Co. v. FCC, 450 F. 3d 528, 533-534 (CADC 2006) (summarizing the 10-year-long regulatory struggle between the ILECs and CLECs).

Respondents William Twombly and Lawrence Marcus (hereinafter plaintiffs) represent a putative class consisting of all “subscribers of local telephone and/or high speed internet services . . . from February 8, 1996 to present.” Amended Complaint in No. 02 CIV. 10220 (GEL) (SDNY) ¶ 53, App. 28 (hereinafter Complaint). In this action against petitioners, a group of ILECs,1 plaintiffs seek treble damages and declaratory and injunctive relief for claimed violations of §1 of the Sherman Act, ch. 647, 26 Stat. 209, as amended, 15 U. S. C. § 1, which prohibits “[ejvery contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.”

The complaint alleges that the ILECs conspired to restrain trade in two ways, each supposedly inflating charges for local telephone and high-speed Internet services. Plaintiffs say, first, that the ILECs “engaged in parallel conduct” in their respective service areas to inhibit the growth of upstart CLECs. Complaint ¶47, App. 23-26. Their actions allegedly included making unfair agreements with the CLECs for access to ILEC networks, providing inferior connections to the networks, overcharging, and billing in ways designed to sabotage the CLECs’ relations with their own customers. Ibid. According to the complaint, the ILECs’ *551“compelling common motivatio[n]” to thwart the CLECs’ competitive efforts naturally led them to form a conspiracy; “[h]ad any one [ILEC] not sought to prevent CLECs . . . from competing effectively , the resulting greater competitive inroads into that [ILEC’s] territory would have revealed the degree to which competitive entry by CLECs would have been successful in the other territories in the absence of such conduct.” Id., ¶ 50, App. 26-27.

Second, the complaint charges agreements by the ILECs to refrain from competing against one another. These are to be inferred from the ILECs’ common failure “meaningfully [to] pursu[e]” “attractive business opportunities]” in contiguous markets where they possessed “substantial competitive advantages,” id., ¶¶ 40-41, App. 21-22, and from a statement of Richard Notebaert, chief executive officer (CEO) of the ILEC Qwest, that competing in the territory of another ILEC “ ‘might be a good way to turn a quick dollar but that doesn’t make it right,’” id., ¶ 42, App. 22.

The complaint couches its ultimate allegations this way:

“In the absence of any meaningful competition between the [ILECs] in one another’s markets, and in light of the parallel course of conduct that each engaged in to prevent competition from CLECs within their respective local telephone and/or high speed internet services markets and the other facts and market circumstances alleged above, Plaintiffs allege upon information and belief that [the ILECs] have entered into a contract, combination or conspiracy to prevent competitive entry in their respective local telephone and/or high speed internet services markets and have agreed not to compete with one another and otherwise allocated customers and markets to one another.” Id., ¶ 51, App. 27.2

*552The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. The District Court acknowledged that “plaintiffs may allege a conspiracy by citing instances of parallel business behavior that suggest an agreement,” but emphasized that “while ‘[circumstantial evidence of consciously parallel behavior may have made heavy inroads into the traditional judicial attitude toward conspiracy[, . . .] “conscious parallelism” has not yet read conspiracy out of the Sherman Act entirely.’” 313 F. Supp. 2d 174, 179 (2003) (quoting Theatre Enterprises, Inc. v. Paramount Film Distributing Corp., 346 U. S. 537, 541 (1954); alterations in original). Thus, the District Court understood that allegations of parallel business conduct, taken alone, do not state a claim under § 1; plaintiffs must allege additional facts that “ten[d] to exclude independent self-interested conduct as an explanation for defendants’ parallel behavior.” 313 F. Supp. 2d, at 179. The District Court found plaintiffs’ allegations of parallel ILEC actions to discourage competition inadequate because “the behavior of each ILEC in resisting the incursion of CLECs is fully explained by the ILEC’s own interests in defending its individual territory.” Id., at 183. As to the ILECs’ supposed agreement against competing with each other, the District Court found that the complaint does not “alleg[e] facts . . . suggesting that refraining from competing in other territories as CLECs was contrary to [the ILECs’] apparent economic interests, and consequently [does] not rais[e] an inference that [the ILECs’] actions were the result of a conspiracy.” Id., at 188.

*553The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed, holding that the District Court tested the complaint by the wrong standard. It held that “plus factors are not required to be pleaded to permit an antitrust claim based on parallel conduct to survive dismissal.” 425 F. 3d 99, 114 (2005) (emphasis in original). Although the Court of Appeals took the view that plaintiffs must plead facts that “include conspiracy among the realm of ‘plausible’ possibilities in order to survive a motion to dismiss,” it then said that “to rule that allegations of parallel anticompetitive conduct fail to support a plausible conspiracy claim, a court would have to conclude that there is no set of facts that would permit a plaintiff to demonstrate that the particular parallelism asserted was the product of collusion rather than coincidence.” Ibid.

We granted certiorari to address the proper standard for pleading an antitrust conspiracy through allegations of parallel conduct, 548 U. S. 903 (2006), and now reverse.

II

A

Because §1 of the Sherman Act “does not prohibit [all] unreasonable restraints of trade . . . but only restraints effected by a contract, combination, or conspiracy,” Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp., 467 U. S. 752, 775 (1984), “[t]he crucial question” is whether the challenged anticompetitive conduct “stem[s] from independent decision or from an agreement, tacit or express,” Theatre Enterprises, 346 U. S., at 540. While a showing of parallel “business behavior is admissible circumstantial evidence from which the fact finder may infer agreement,” it falls short of “conclusively establishing] agreement or . . . itself constituting] a Sherman Act offense.” Id., at 540-541. Even “conscious parallelism,” a common reaction of “firms in a concentrated market [that] recogniz[e] their shared economic interests and their interdependence with respect to price and output deei*554sions” is “not in itself unlawful.” Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 509 U. S. 209, 227 (1993); see 6 P. Areeda & H. Hovenkamp, Antitrust Law ¶ 1433a, p. 236 (2d ed. 2003) (hereinafter Ajreeda & Hovenkamp) (“The courts are nearly unanimous in saying that mere interdependent parallelism does not establish the contract, combination, or conspiracy required by Sherman Act § 1”); Turner, The Definition of Agreement Under the Sherman Act: Conscious Parallelism and Refusals to Deal, 75 Harv. L. Rev. 655, 672 (1962) (“[M]ere interdependence of basic price decisions is not conspiracy”).

The inadequacy of showing parallel conduct or interdependence, without more, mirrors the ambiguity of the behavior: consistent with conspiracy, but just as much in line with a wide swath of rational and competitive business strategy unilaterally prompted by common perceptions of the market. See, e. g., AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, Epstein, Motions to Dismiss Antitrust Cases: Separating Fact from Fantasy, Related Publication 06-08, pp. 3-4 (2006) (discussing problem of “false positives” in § 1 suits). Accordingly, we have previously hedged against false inferences from identical behavior at a number of points in the trial sequence. An antitrust conspiracy plaintiff with evidence showing nothing beyond parallel conduct is not entitled to a directed verdict, see Theatre Enterprises, supra; proof of a § 1 conspiracy must include evidence tending to exclude the possibility of independent action, see Monsanto Co. v. Spray-Rite Service Corp., 465 U. S. 752 (1984); and at the summary judgment stage a § 1 plaintiff’s offer of conspiracy evidence must tend to rule out the possibility that the defendants were acting independently, see Matsushita Elec. Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U. S. 574 (1986).

B

This case presents the antecedent question of what a plaintiff must plead in order to state a claim under §1 of the *555Sherman Act. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a)(2) requires only “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief,” in order to “give the defendant fair notice of what the . . . claim is and the grounds upon which it rests,” Conley v. Gibson, 355 U. S. 41, 47 (1957). While a complaint attacked by a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss does not need detailed factual allegations, ibid.; Sanjuan v. American 13d. of Psychiatry and Neurology, Inc., 40 F. 3d 247, 251 (CA7 1994), a plaintiff’s obligation to provide the “grounds” of his “entitle[ment] to relief” requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do, see Papasan v. Allain, 478 U. S. 265, 286 (1986) (on a motion to dismiss, courts “are not bound to accept as true a legal conclusion couched as a factual allegation”). Factual allegations must be enough to raise a right to relief above the speculative level, see 5 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1216, pp. 235-236 (3d ed. 2004) (hereinafter Wright & Miller) (“[T]he pleading must contain something more . . . than ... a statement of facts that merely creates a suspicion [of] a legally cognizable right of action”),3 on the assumption that all the allegations in the complaint are true (even if doubtful in fact), see, e. g., Swierkiewicz v. *556Sorema N. A, 534 U. S. 506, 508, n. 1 (2002); Neitzke v. Williams, 490 U. S. 319, 327 (1989) (“Rule 12(b)(6) does not countenance ... dismissals based on a judge’s disbelief of a complaint’s factual allegations”); Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U. S. 232, 236 (1974) (a well-pleaded complaint may proceed even if it appears “that a recovery is very remote and unlikely”).

In applying these general standards to a § 1 claim, we hold that stating such a claim requires a complaint with enough factual matter (taken as true) to suggest that an agreement was made. Asking for plausible grounds to infer an agreement does not impose a probability requirement at the pleading stage; it simply calls for enough fact to raise a reasonable expectation that discovery will reveal evidence of illegal agreement.4 And, of course, a well-pleaded complaint may proceed even if it strikes a savvy judge that actual proof of the facts alleged is improbable, and “that a recovery is very remote and unlikely.” Ibid. In identifying facts that are suggestive enough to render a § 1 conspiracy plausible, we have the benefit of the prior rulings and considered views of leading commentators, already quoted, that lawful parallel conduct fails to bespeak unlawful agreement. It makes sense to say, therefore, that an allegation of parallel conduct and a bare assertion of conspiracy will not suffice. Without *557more, parallel conduct does not suggest conspiracy, and a conclusory allegation of agreement at some unidentified point does not supply facts adequate to show illegality. Hence, when allegations of parallel conduct are set out in order to make a § 1 claim, they must be placed in a context that raises a suggestion of a preceding agreement, not merely parallel conduct that could just as well be independent action.

The need at the pleading stage for allegations plausibly suggesting (not merely consistent with) agreement reflects the threshold requirement of Rule 8(a)(2) that the “plain statement” possess enough heft to “sho[w] that the pleader is entitled to relief.” A statement of parallel conduct, even conduct consciously undertaken, needs some setting suggesting the agreement necessary to make out a § 1 claim; without that further circumstance pointing toward a meeting of the minds, an account of a defendant’s commercial efforts stays in neutral territory. An allegation of parallel conduct is thus much like a naked assertion of conspiracy in a § 1 complaint: it gets the eomplaint close to stating a claim, but without some further factual enhancement it stops short of the line between possibility and plausibility of “entitle[ment] to relief.” Cf. DM Research, Inc. v. College of Am. Pathologists, 170 F. 3d 53, 56 (CA1 1999) (“[T]erms like ‘conspiracy,’ or even ‘agreement,’ are border-line: they might well be sufficient in conjunction with a more specific allegation — for example, identifying a written agreement or even a basis for inferring a tacit agreement,. . . but a court is not required to accept such terms as a sufficient basis for a complaint”).5

We alluded to the practical significance of the Rule 8 entitlement requirement in Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Broudo, 544 U. S. 336 (2005), when we explained that something beyond the mere possibility of loss causation must be *558alleged, lest a plaintiff with “ ‘a largely groundless claim’ ” be allowed to “ ‘take up the time of a number of other people, with the right to do so representing an in terrorem increment of the settlement value.’” Id., at 347 (quoting Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U. S. 723, 741 (1975)). So, when the allegations in a complaint, however true, could not raise a claim of entitlement to relief, “ ‘this basic deficiency should ... be exposed at the point of minimum expenditure of time and money by the parties and the court.’” 5 Wright & Miller §1216, at 233-234 (quoting Daves v. Hawaiian Dredging Co., 114 F. Supp. 643, 645 (Haw. 1953)); see also Dura, supra, at 346; Asahi Glass Co. v. Pentech Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 289 F. Supp. 2d 986, 995 (ND Ill. 2003) (Posner, J., sitting by designation) (“[S]ome threshold of plausibility must be crossed at the outset before a patent antitrust ease should be permitted to go into its inevitably costly and protracted discovery phase”).

Thus, it is one thing to be cautious before dismissing an antitrust complaint in advance of discovery, cf. Poller v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 368 U. S. 464, 473 (1962), but quite another to forget that proceeding to antitrust discovery can be expensive. As we indicated over 20 years ago in Associated Gen. Contractors of Cal., Inc. v. Carpenters, 459 U. S. 519, 528, n. 17 (1983), “a district court must retain the power to insist upon some specificity in pleading before allowing a potentially massive factual controversy to proceed.” See also Car Carriers, Inc. v. Ford Motor Co., 745 F. 2d 1101, 1106 (CA7 1984) (“[T]he costs of modern federal antitrust litigation and the increasing caseload of the federal courts counsel against sending the parties into discovery when there is no reasonable likelihood that the plaintiffs can construct a claim from the events related in the complaint”); Note, Modeling the Effect of One-Way Fee Shifting on Discovery Abuse in Private Antitrust Litigation, 78 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1887, 1898-1899 (2003) (discussing the unusually high cost of discovery in antitrust cases); Manual for Complex Lit*559igation, Fourth, § 30, p. 519 (2004) (describing extensive scope of discovery in antitrust cases); Memorandum from Paul V. Niemeyer, Chair, Advisory Committee on Civil Rules, to Hon. Anthony J. Scirica, Chair, Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure (May 11,1999), 192 F. R. D. 354,357 (2000) (reporting that discovery accounts for as much as 90 percent of litigation costs when discovery is actively employed). That potential expense is obvious enough in the present case: plaintiffs represent a putative class of at least 90 percent of all subscribers to local telephone or high-speed Internet service in the continental United States, in an action against America’s largest telecommunications firms (with many thousands of employees generating reams and gigabytes of business records) for unspecified (if any) instances of antitrust violations that allegedly occurred over a period of seven years.

It is no answer to say that a claim just shy of a plausible entitlement to relief can, if groundless, be weeded out early in the discovery process through “careful case management,” post, at 573, given the common lament that the success of judicial supervision in checking discovery abuse has been on the modest side. See, e.g., Easterbrook, Discovery as Abuse, 69 B. U. L. Rev. 635, 638 (1989) (“Judges can do little about impositional discovery when parties control the legal claims to be presented and conduct the discovery themselves”). And it is self-evident that the problem of discovery abuse cannot be solved by “careful scrutiny of evidence at the summary judgment stage,” much less “lucid instructions to juries,” post, at 573; the threat of discovery expense will push cost-conscious defendants to settle even anemic cases before reaching those proceedings. Probably, then, it is only by taking care to require allegations that reach the level suggesting conspiracy that we can hope to avoid the potentially enormous expense of discovery in cases with no “ ‘reasonably founded hope that the [discovery] process will reveal relevant evidence’” to support a §1 claim. Dura, *560544 U. S., at 347 (quoting Blue Chip Stamps, supra, at 741; alteration in Dura).6

Plaintiffs do not, of course, dispute the requirement of plausibility and the need for something more than merely parallel behavior explained in Theatre Enterprises, Monsanto, and Matsushita, and their main argument against the plausibility standard at the pleading stage is its ostensible *561conflict with an early statement of ours construing Rule 8. Justice Black’s opinion for the Court in Conley v. Gibson spoke not only of the need for fair notice of the grounds for entitlement to relief but of “the accepted rule that a complaint should not be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.” 355 U. S., at 45-46. This “no set of facts” language can be read in isolation as saying that any statement revealing the theory of the claim will suffice unless its factual impossibility may be shown from the face of the pleadings; and the Court of Appeals appears to have read Conley in some such way when formulating its understanding of the proper pleading standard, see 425 F. 3d, at 106, 114 (invoking Conley’s “no set of facts” language in describing the standard for dismissal).7

On such a focused and literal reading of Conley’s “no set of facts,” a wholly conclusory statement of claim would survive a motion to dismiss whenever the pleadings left open the possibility that a plaintiff might later establish some “set of [undisclosed] facts” to support recovery. So here, the Court of Appeals specifically found the prospect of unearthing direct evidence of conspiracy sufficient to preclude dismissal, even though the complaint does not set forth a single *562fact in a context that suggests an agreement. 425 F. 3d, at 106,114. It seems fair to say that this approach to pleading would dispense with any showing of a “ ‘reasonably founded hope’” that a plaintiff would be able to make a case, see Dura, 544 U. S., at 347 (quoting Blue Chip Stamps, 421 U. S., at 741); Mr. Micawber’s optimism would be enough.

Seeing this, a good many judges and commentators have balked at taking the literal terms of the Conley passage as a pleading standard. See, e. g., Car Carriers, 745 F. 2d, at 1106 (“Conley has never been interpreted literally” and, “[i]n practice, a complaint... must contain either direct or inferential allegations respecting all the material elements necessary to sustain recovery under some viable legal theory” (internal quotation marks omitted; emphasis and omission in original)); Ascon Properties, Inc. v. Mobil Oil Co., 866 F. 2d 1149, 1155 (CA9 1989) (tension between Conley’s “no set of facts” language and its acknowledgment that a plaintiff must provide the “grounds” on which his claim rests); O’Brien v. DiGrazia, 544 F. 2d 543, 546, n. 3 (CA1 1976) (“[W]hen a plaintiff . . . supplies facts to support his claim, we do not think that Conley imposes a duty on the courts to conjure up unpleaded facts that might turn a frivolous claim of unconstitutional . . . action into a substantial one”); McGregor v. Industrial Excess Landfill, Inc., 856 F. 2d 39,42-43 (CA6 1988) (quoting O’Brien’s analysis); Hazard, From Whom No Secrets Are Hid, 76 Texas L. Rev. 1665, 1685 (1998) (describing Conley as having “turned Rule 8 on its head”); Marcus, The Revival of Fact Pleading Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, 86 Colum. L. Rev. 433, 463-465 (1986) (noting tension between Conley and subsequent understandings of Rule 8).

We could go on, but there is no need to pile up further citations to show that Conley’s “no set of facts” language has been questioned, criticized, and explained away long enough. To be fair to the Conley Court, the passage should be understood in light of the opinion’s preceding summary of the com*563plaint’s concrete allegations, which the Court quite reasonably understood as amply stating a claim for relief. But the passage so often quoted fails to mention this understanding on the part of the Court, and after puzzling the profession for 50 years, this famous observation has earned its retirement. The phrase is best forgotten as an incomplete, negative gloss on an accepted pleading standard: once a claim has been stated adequately, it may be supported by showing any set of facts consistent with the allegations in the complaint. See Sanjuan, 40 F. 3d, at 251 (once a claim for relief has been stated, a plaintiff “receives the benefit of imagination, so long as the hypotheses are consistent with the complaint”); accord, Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 514; National Organization for Women, Inc. v. Scheidler, 510 U. S. 249, 256 (1994); H. J. Inc. v. Northwestern Bell Telephone Co., 492 U. S. 229, 249-250 (1989); Hishon v. King & Spalding, 467 U. S. 69, 73 (1984). Conley, then, described the breadth of opportunity to prove what an adequate complaint claims, not the minimum standard of adequate pleading to govern a complaint’s survival.8

*564III

When we look for plausibility in this complaint, we agree with the District Court that plaintiffs’ claim of conspiracy in restraint of trade comes up short. To begin with, the complaint leaves no doubt that plaintiffs rest their § 1 claim on descriptions of parallel conduct and not on any independent allegation of actual agreement among the ILECs. Supra, at 550-551. Although in form a few stray statements speak directly of agreement,9 on fair reading these are merely legal conclusions resting on the prior allegations. Thus, the com*565plaint first takes account of the alleged “absence of any meaningful competition between [the ILECs] in one another’s markets,” “the parallel course of conduct that each [ILEC] engaged in to prevent competition from CLECs,” “and the other facts and market circumstances alleged [earlier]”; “in light of” these, the complaint concludes “that [the ILECs] have entered into a contract, combination or conspiracy to prevent competitive entry into their . . . markets and have agreed not to compete with one another.” Complaint ¶51, App. 27.10 The nub of the complaint, then, is the ILECs’ parallel behavior, consisting of steps to keep the CLECs out and manifest disinterest in becoming CLECs themselves, and its sufficiency turns on the suggestions raised by this conduct when viewed in light of common economic experience.11

*566We think that nothing contained in the complaint invests either the action or inaction alleged with a plausible suggestion of conspiracy. As to the ILECs’ supposed agreement to disobey the 1996 Act and thwart the CLECs’ attempts to compete, we agree with the District Court that nothing in the complaint intimates that the resistance to the upstarts was anything more than the natural, unilateral reaction of each ILEC intent on keeping its regional dominance. The 1996 Act did more than just subject the ILECs to competition; it obliged them to subsidize their competitors with their own equipment at wholesale rates. The economic incentive to resist was powerful, but resisting competition is routine market conduct, and even if the ILECs flouted the 1996 Act in all the ways the plaintiffs allege, see id., ¶ 47, App. 23-24, there is no reason to infer that the companies had agreed among themselves to do what was only natural anyway; so natural, in fact, that if alleging parallel decisions to resist competition were enough to imply an antitrust conspiracy, pleading a § 1 violation against almost any group of competing businesses would be a sure thing.

The complaint makes its closest pass at a predicate for conspiracy with the claim that collusion was necessary because success by even one CLEG in an ILEC’s territory “would have revealed the degree to which competitive entry by CLECs would have been successful in the other territories.” Id., ¶ 50, App. 26-27. But, its logic aside, this general premise still fails to answer the point that there was just no need for joint encouragement to resist the 1996 Act; as the District Court said, “each ILEC has reason to want to avoid dealing with CLECs” and “each ILEC would attempt to keep CLECs out, regardless of the actions of the other ILECs.” 313 F. Supp. 2d, at 184; cf. Kramer v. Pollock-Krasner Foundation, 890 F. Supp. 250, 256 (SONY 1995) (while the plaintiff “may believe the defendants conspired ... , the defendants’ allegedly conspiratorial ac*567tions could equally have been prompted by lawful, independent goals which do not constitute a conspiracy”).12

Plaintiffs’ second conspiracy theory rests on the competitive reticence among the ILECs themselves in the wake of the 1996 Act, which was supposedly passed in the “‘hop[e] that the large incumbent local monopoly companies ... might attack their neighbors’ service areas, as they are the best situated to do so.’” Complaint ¶38, App. 20 (quoting Consumer Federation of America, Lessons from 1996 Telecommunications Act: Deregulation Before Meaningful Competition Spells Consumer Disaster, p. 12 (Feb. 2000)). Contrary to hope, the ILECs declined “ ‘to enter each other’s service territories in any significant way,’ ” Complaint ¶ 38, App. 20, and the local telephone and high-speed Internet market remains highly compartmentalized geographically, with minimal competition. Based on this state of affairs, and perceiving the ILECs to be blessed with “especially attractive business opportunities” in surrounding markets dominated by other ILECs, the plaintiffs assert that the ILECs’ parallel conduct was “strongly suggestive of conspiracy.” Id., ¶ 40, App. 21.

But it was not suggestive of conspiracy, not if history teaches anything. In a traditionally unregulated industry with low barriers to entry, sparse competition among large firms dominating separate geographical segments of the market could very well signify illegal agreement, but here we have an obvious alternative explanation. In the decade *568preceding the 1996 Act and well before that, monopoly was the norm in telecommunications, not the exception. See Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC, 535 U. S. 467, 477-478 (2002) (describing telephone service providers as traditional public monopolies). The ILECs were born in that world, doubtless liked the world the way it was, and surely knew the adage about him who lives by the sword. Hence, a natural explanation for the noncompetition alleged is that the former Government-sanctioned monopolists were sitting tight, expecting their neighbors tp do the same thing.

In fact, the complaint itself gives reasons to believe that the ILECs would see their best interests in keeping to their old turf. Although the complaint says generally that the ILECs passed up “especially attractive business opportunities]” by declining to compete as CLECs against other ILECs, Complaint ¶ 40, App. 21, it does not allege that competition as CLECs was potentially any more lucrative than other opportunities being pursued by the ILECs during the same period,13 and the complaint is replete with indications that any CLEC faced nearly insurmountable barriers to profitability owing to the ILECs’ flagrant resistance to the network sharing requirements of the 1996 Act, id., ¶ 47, App. *56923-26. Not only that, but even without a monopolistic tradition and the peculiar difficulty of mandating shared networks, “[f]irms do not expand without limit and none of them enters every market that an outside observer might regard as profitable, or even a small portion of such markets.” Areeda & Hovenkamp ¶ 307d, at 155 (Supp. 2006) (commenting on the case at bar). The upshot is that Congress may have expected some ILECs to become CLECs in the legacy territories of other ILECs, but the disappointment does not make conspiracy plausible. We agree with the District Court’s assessment that antitrust conspiracy was not suggested by the facts adduced under either theory of the complaint, which thus fails to state a valid § 1 claim.14

Plaintiffs say that our analysis runs counter to Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 508, which held that “a complaint in an employment discrimination lawsuit [need] not contain specific facts establishing a prima facie case of discrimination under the framework set forth in McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U. S. 792 (1973).” They argue that just as the prima facie case is a “flexible evidentiary standard” that “should not be transposed into a rigid pleading standard for discrimination cases,” Swierkiewicz, supra, at 512, “trans-posting] 'plus factor’ summary judgment analysis woodenly into a rigid Rule 12(b)(6) pleading standard . . . would be unwise,” Brief for Respondents 39. As the District Court *570correctly understood, however, “Swierkiewicz did not change the law of pleading, but simply re-emphasized . . . that the Second Circuit’s use of a heightened pleading standard for Title VII cases was contrary to the Federal Rules’ structure of liberal pleading requirements.” 313 F. Supp. 2d, at 181 (citation and footnote omitted). Even though Swierkiewicz’s pleadings “detailed the events leading to his termination, provided relevant dates, and included the ages and nationalities of at least some of the relevant persons involved with his termination,” the Court of Appeals dismissed his complaint for failing to allege certain additional facts that Swierkiewicz would need at the trial stage to support his claim in the absence of direct evidence of discrimination. Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 514. We reversed on the ground that the Court of Appeals had impermissibly applied what amounted to a heightened pleading requirement by insisting that Swierkiewicz allege “specific facts” beyond those necessary to state his claim and the grounds showing entitlement to relief. Id., at 508.

Here, in contrast, we do not require heightened fact pleading of specifics, but only enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face. Because the plaintiffs here have not nudged their claims across the line from conceivable to plausible, their complaint must be dismissed.

* * *

The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Justice Stevens,

with whom

Justice Ginsburg joins except as to Part IV, dissenting.

In the first paragraph of its 23-page opinion the Court states that the question to be decided is whether allegations that “major telecommunications providers engaged in certain *571parallel conduct unfavorable to competition” suffice to state a violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act. Ante, at 548-549. The answer to that question has been settled for more than 50 years. If that were indeed the issue, a summary reversal citing Theatre Enterprises, Inc. v. Paramount Film Distributing Corp., 346 U. S. 537 (1954), would adequately resolve this case. As Theatre Enterprises held, parallel conduct is circumstantial evidence admissible on the issue of conspiracy, but it is not itself illegal. Id., at 540-542.

Thus, this is a case in which there is no dispute about the substantive law. If the defendants acted independently, their conduct was perfectly lawful. If, however, that conduct is the product of a horizontal agreement among potential competitors, it was unlawful. The plaintiffs have alleged such an agreement and, because the complaint was dismissed in advance of answer, the allegation has not even been denied. Why, then, does the case not proceed? Does a judicial opinion that the charge is not “plausible” provide a legally acceptable reason for dismissing the complaint? I think not.

Respondents’ amended complaint describes a variety of circumstantial evidence and makes the straightforward allegation that petitioners

“entered into a contract, combination or conspiracy to prevent competitive entry in their respective local telephone and/or high speed internet services markets and have agreed not to compete with one another and otherwise allocated customers and markets to one another.” Amended Complaint in No. 02 CIV. 10220 (GEL) (SDNY) ¶ 51, App. 27 (hereinafter Complaint).

The complaint explains that, contrary to Congress’ expectation when it enacted the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and consistent with their own economic self-interests, petitioner Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs) have assiduously avoided infringing upon each other’s markets and have *572refused to permit nonincumbent competitors to access their networks. The complaint quotes Richard Notebaert, the former chief executive officer of one such ILEC, as saying that competing in a neighboring ILEC’s territory “ ‘might be a good way to turn a quick dollar but that doesn’t make it right.’” Id., ¶42, App. 22. Moreover, respondents allege that petitioners “communicate amongst themselves” through numerous industry associations. Id., ¶ 46, App. 23. In sum, respondents allege that petitioners entered into an agreement that has long been recognized as a classic per se violation of the Sherman Act. See Report of the Attorney General’s National Committee to Study the Antitrust Laws 26 (1955).

Under rules of procedure that have been well settled since well before our decision in Theatre Enterprises, a judge ruling on a defendant’s motion to dismiss a complaint “must accept as true all of the factual allegations contained in the complaint.” Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N. A., 534 U. S. 506, 508, n. 1 (2002); see Overstreet v. North Shore Corp., 318 U. S. 125,127 (1943). But instead of requiring knowledgeable executives such as Notebaert to respond to these allegations by way of sworn depositions or other limited discovery — and indeed without so much as requiring petitioners to file an answer denying that they entered into any agreement — the majority permits immediate dismissal based on the assurances of company lawyers that nothing untoward was afoot. The Court embraces the argument of those lawyers that “there is no reason to infer that the companies had agreed among themselves to do what was only natural anyway,” ante, at 566; that “there was just no need for joint encouragement to resist the 1996 Act,” ibid.; and that the “natural explanation for the noncompetition alleged is that the former Government-sanctioned monopolists were sitting tight, expecting their neighbors to do the same thing,” ante, at 568.

The Court and petitioners’ legal team are no doubt correct that the parallel conduct alleged is consistent with the ab*573sence of any contract, combination, or conspiracy. But that conduct is also entirely consistent with the presence of the illegal agreement alleged in the complaint. And the charge that petitioners “agreed not to compete with one another” is not just one of “a few stray statements,” ante, at 564; it is an allegation describing unlawful conduct. As such, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, our longstanding precedent, and sound practice mandate that the District Court at least require some sort of response from petitioners before dismissing the case.

Two practical concerns presumably explain the Court’s dramatic departure from settled procedural law. Private antitrust litigation can be enormously expensive, and there is a risk that jurors may mistakenly conclude that evidence of parallel conduct has proved that the parties acted pursuant to an agreement when they in fact merely made similar independent decisions. Those concerns merit careful case management, including strict control of discovery, careful scrutiny of evidence at the summary judgment stage, and lucid instructions to juries; they do not, however, justify the dismissal of an adequately pleaded complaint without even requiring the defendants to file answers denying a charge that they in fact engaged in collective decisionmaking. More importantly, they do not justify an interpretation of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) that seems to be driven by the majority’s appraisal of the plausibility of the ultimate factual allegation rather than its legal sufficiency.

I

Rule 8(a)(2) of the Federal Rules requires that a complaint contain “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” The Rule did not come about by happenstance, and its language is not inadvertent. The English experience with Byzantine special pleading rules — illustrated by the hypertechnical Hilary rules of *57418341 — made obvious the appeal of a pleading standard that was easy for the common litigant to understand and sufficed to put the defendant on notice as to the nature of the claim against him and the relief sought. Stateside, David Dudley Field developed the highly influential New York Code of 1848, which required “[a] statement of the facts constituting the cause of action, in ordinary and concise language, without repetition, and in such a manner as to enable a person of common understanding to know what is intended.” An Act to Simplify and Abridge the Practice, Pleadings and Proceedings of the Courts of this State, ch. 379, § 120(2), 1848 N. Y. Laws pp. 497, 521. Substantially similar language appeared in the Federal Equity Rules adopted in 1912. See Fed. Equity Rule 25 (requiring “a short and simple statement of the ultimate facts upon which the plaintiff asks relief, omitting any mere statement of evidence”).

A difficulty arose, however, in that the Field Code and its progeny required a plaintiff to plead “facts” rather than “conclusions,” a distinction that proved far easier to say than to apply. As commentators have noted,

“it is virtually impossible logically to distinguish among ‘ultimate facts,’ ‘evidence,’ and ‘conclusions.’ Essentially any allegation in a pleading must be an assertion that certain occurrences took place. The pleading spectrum, passing from evidence through ultimate facts to conclusions, is largely a continuum varying only in the degree of particularity with which the occurrences are described.” Weinstein & Distler, Comments on Procedural Reform: Drafting Pleading Rules, 57 Colum. L. Rev. 518, 520-521 (1957).

See also Cook, Statements of Fact in Pleading Under the Codes, 21 Colum. L. Rev. 416, 417 (1921) (hereinafter Cook) (“[T]here is no logical distinction between statements which are grouped by the courts under the phrases ‘statements of *575fact’ and ‘conclusions of law’ ”). Rule 8 was directly responsive to this difficulty. Its drafters intentionally avoided any reference to “facts” or “evidence” or “conclusions.” See 5 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure §1216, p. 207 (3d ed. 2004) (hereinafter Wright & Miller) (“The substitution of ‘claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief’ for the code formulation of the ‘facts’ constituting a ‘cause of action’ was intended to avoid the distinctions drawn under the codes among ‘evidentiary facts,’ ‘ultimate facts,’ and ‘conclusions’... ”).

Under the relaxed pleading standards of the Federal Rules, the idea was not to keep litigants out of court but rather to keep them in. The merits of a claim would be sorted out during a flexible pretrial process and, as appropriate, through the crucible of trial. See Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 514 (“The liberal notice pleading of Rule 8(a) is the starting point of a simplified pleading system, which was adopted to focus litigation on the merits of a claim”). Charles E. Clark, the “principal draftsman” of the Federal Rules,2 put it thus:

“Experience has shown ... that we cannot expect the proof of the case to be made through the pleadings, and that such proof is really not their function. We can expect a general statement distinguishing the case from all others, so that the manner and form of trial and remedy expected are clear, and so that a permanent judgment will result.” The New Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: The Last Phase — Underlying Philosophy Embodied in Some of the Basic Provisions of the New Procedure, 23 A. B. A. J. 976, 977 (1937) (hereinafter Clark, New Federal Rules).

The pleading paradigm under the new Federal Rules was well illustrated by the inclusion in the appendix of Form 9, *576a complaint for negligence. As relevant, the Form 9 complaint states only: “On June 1, 1936, in a public highway called Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts, defendant negligently drove a motor vehicle against plaintiff who was then crossing said highway.” Form 9, Complaint for Negligence, Forms App., Fed. Rules Civ. Proc., 28 U. S. C. App., p. 829 (hereinafter Form 9). The complaint then describes the plaintiff’s injuries and demands judgment. The asserted ground for relief — namely, the defendant’s negligent driving — would have been called a “‘conclusion of law’” under the code pleading of old. See, e. g., Cook 419. But that bare allegation suffices under a system that “restrict[s] the pleadings to the task of general notice-giving and investís] the deposition-discovery process with a vital role in the preparation for trial.”3 Hickman v. Taylor, 329 U. S. 495, 501 (1947); see also Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 513, n. 4 (citing Form 9 as an example of “ ‘the simplicity and brevity of statement which the rules contemplate’”); Thomson v. Washington, 362 F. 3d 969, 970 (CA7 2004) (Posner, J.) (“The federal rules replaced fact pleading with notice pleading”).

II

It is in the context of this history that Conley v. Gibson, 355 U. S. 41 (1957), must be understood. The Conley plaintiffs were black railroad workers who alleged that their union local had refused to protect them against discriminatory discharges, in violation of the National Railway Labor Act. The union sought to dismiss the complaint on the ground that its general allegations of discriminatory treatment by the defendants lacked sufficient specificity. Writing *577for a unanimous Court, Justice Black rejected the union’s claim as foreclosed by the language of Rule 8. Id., at 47-48. In the course of doing so, he articulated the formulation the Court rejects today: “In appraising the sufficiency of the complaint we follow, of course, the accepted rule that a complaint should not be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.” Id., at 45-46.

Consistent with the design of the Federal Rules, Conley's “no set of facts” formulation permits outright dismissal only when proceeding to discovery or beyond would be futile. Once it is clear that a plaintiff has stated a claim that, if true, would entitle him to relief, matters of proof are appropriately relegated to other stages of the trial process. Today, however, in its explanation of a decision to dismiss a complaint that it regards as a fishing expedition, the Court scraps Conley's “no set of facts” language. Concluding that the phrase has been “questioned, criticized, and explained away long enough,” ante, at 562, the Court dismisses it as careless composition.

If Conley's “no set of facts” language is to be interred, let it not be without a eulogy. That exact language, which the majority says has “puzzl[ed] the profession for 50 years,” ante, at 563, has been cited as authority in a dozen opinions of this Court and four separate writings.4 In not one of *578those 16 opinions was the language “questioned,” “criticized,” or “explained away.” Indeed, today’s opinion is the first by any Member of this Court to express any doubt as to the adequacy of the Conley formulation. Taking their cues from the federal courts, 26 States and the District of Columbia utilize as their standard for dismissal of a complaint the very language the majority repudiates: whether it appears “beyond doubt” that “no set of facts” in support of the claim would entitle the plaintiff to relief.5

*579Petitioners have not requested that the Conley formulation be retired, nor have any of the six amici who filed briefs in support of petitioners. I would not rewrite the Nation’s civil procedure textbooks and call into doubt the pleading rules of most of its States without far more informed deliberation as to the costs of doing so. Congress has established a process — a rulemaking process — for revisions of that order. See 28 U. S. C. §§2072-2074 (2000 ed. and Supp. IV).

Today’s majority calls Conley’s “ ‘no set of facts’ ” language “an incomplete, negative gloss on an accepted pleading standard: once a claim has been stated adequately, it may be *580supported by showing any set of facts consistent with the allegations in the complaint.” Ante, at 563. This is not and cannot be what the Conley Court meant. First, as I have explained, and as the Conley Court well knew, the pleading standard the Federal Rules meant to codify does not require, or even invite, the pleading of facts.6 The “pleading standard” label the majority gives to what it reads into the Conley opinion — a statement of the permissible factual support for an adequately pleaded complaint — would not, therefore, have impressed the Conley Court itself. Rather, that Court would have understood the majority’s remodeling of its language to express an evidentiary standard, which the Conley Court had neither need nor want to explicate. Second, it is pellueidly clear that the Conley Court was interested in what a complaint must contain, not what it may contain. In fact, the Court said without qualification that it was “appraising the sufficiency of the complaint.” 355 U. S., at 45 (emphasis added). It was, to paraphrase today’s májority, describing “the minimum standard of adequate pleading to govern a complaint’s survival,” ante, at 563.

We can be triply sure as to Conley’s meaning by examining the three Court of Appeals cases the Conley Court cited as support for the “accepted rule” that “a complaint should not *581be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.” 355 U. S., at 45-46. In the first case, Leimer v. State Mut. Life Assurance Co. of Worcester, Mass., 108 F. 2d 302 (CA8 1940), the plaintiff alleged that she was the beneficiary of a life insurance plan and that the insurance company was wrongfully withholding proceeds from her. In reversing the District Court’s grant of the defendant’s motion to dismiss, the Eighth Circuit noted that court’s own longstanding rule that, to warrant dismissal, “ ‘it should appear from the allegations that a cause of action does not exist, rather than that a cause of action has been defectively stated.’” Id., at 305 (quoting Winget v. Rockwood, 69 F. 2d 326, 329 (CA8 1934)).

The Leimer court viewed the Federal Rules — specifically Rules 8(a)(2), 12(b)(6), 12(e) (motion for a more definite statement), and 56 (motion for summary judgment) — as reinforcing the notion that “there is no justification for dismissing a complaint for insufficiency of statement, except where it appears to a certainty that the plaintiff would be entitled to no relief under any state of facts which could be proved in support of the claim.” 108 F. 2d, at 306. The court refuted in the strongest terms any suggestion that the unlikelihood of recovery should determine the fate of a complaint: “No matter how improbable it may be that she can prove her claim, she is entitled to an opportunity to make the attempt, and is not required to accept as final a determination of her rights based upon inferences drawn in favor of the defendant from her amended complaint.” Ibid.

The Third Circuit relied on Leimer’s admonition in Continental Collieries, Inc. v. Shober, 130 F. 2d 631 (1942), which the Conley Court also cited in support of its “no set of facts” formulation. In a diversity action the plaintiff alleged breaeh of contract, but the District Court dismissed the complaint on the ground that the contract appeared to be unenforceable under state law. The Court of Appeals reversed, *582concluding that there were facts in dispute that went to the enforceability of the contract, and that the rule at the pleading stage was as in Leimer: “No matter how likely it may seem that the pleader will be unable to prove his case, he is entitled, upon averring a claim, to an opportunity to try to prove it.” 130 F. 3d, at 635.

The third case the Conley Court cited approvingly was written by Judge Clark himself. In Dioguardi v. Durning, 139 F. 2d 774 (CA2 1944), the pro se plaintiff, an importer of “tonics,” charged the customs inspector with auctioning off the plaintiff’s former merchandise for less than was bid for it — and indeed for an amount equal to the plaintiff’s own bid — and complained that two cases of tonics went missing three weeks before the sale. The inference, hinted at by the averments but never stated in so many words, was that the defendant fraudulently denied the plaintiff his rightful claim to the tonics, which, if true, would have violated federal law. Writing six years after the adoption of the Federal Rules he held the lead rein in drafting, Judge Clark said that the defendant

“could have disclosed the facts from his point of view, in advance of a trial if he chose, by asking for a pre-trial hearing or by moving for a summary judgment with supporting affidavits. But, as it stands, we do not see how the plaintiff may properly be deprived of his day in court to show what he obviously so firmly believes and what for present purposes defendant must be taken as admitting.” Id., at 775.

As any civil procedure student knows, Judge Clark’s opinion disquieted the defense bar and gave rise to a movement to revise Rule 8 to require a plaintiff to plead a “ ‘cause of action.’ ” See 5 Wright & Miller § 1201, at 86-87. The movement failed, see ibid.; Dioguardi was explicitly approved in Conley; and “[i]n retrospect the case itself seems to be a *583routine application of principles that are universally accepted,” 5 Wright & Miller § 1220, at 284-285.

In light of Leimer, Continental Collieries, and Dioguardi, Conley’s statement that a complaint is not to be dismissed unless “no set of facts” in support thereof would entitle the plaintiff to relief is hardly “puzzling,” ante, at 562-563. It reflects a philosophy that, unlike in the days of code pleading, separating the wheat from the chaff is a task assigned to the pretrial and trial process. Conley’s language, in short, captures the policy choice embodied in the Federal Rules and binding on the federal courts.

We have consistently reaffirmed that basic understanding of the Federal Rules in the half century since Conley. For example, in Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U. S. 232 (1974), we reversed the Court of Appeals’ dismissal on the pleadings when the respondents, the Governor and other officials of the State of Ohio, argued that the petitioners’ claims were barred by sovereign immunity. In a unanimous opinion by then-justice Rehnquist, we emphasized:

“When a federal court reviews the sufficiency of a complaint, before the reception of any evidence either by affidavit or admissions, its task is necessarily a limited one. The issue is not whether a plaintiff will ultimately prevail but whether the claimant is entitled to offer evidence to support the claims. Indeed it may appear on the face of the pleadings that a recovery is very remote and unlikely but that is not the test.’’ Id., at 236 (emphasis added).

The Rhodes plaintiffs had “alleged generally and in conclusory terms” that the defendants, by calling out the National Guard to suppress the Kent State University student protests, “were guilty of wanton, wilful and negligent conduct.” Krause v. Rhodes, 471 F. 2d 430, 433 (CA6 1972). We reversed the Court of Appeals on the ground that “[w]hatever *584the plaintiffs may or may not be able to establish as to the merits of their allegations, their claims, as stated in the complaints, given the favorable reading required by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,” were not barred by the Eleventh Amendment because they were styled as suits against the defendants in their individual capacities. 416 U. S., at 238.

We again spoke with one voice against efforts to expand pleading requirements beyond their appointed limits in Leatherman v. Tarrant County Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination Unit, 507 U. S. 163 (1993). Writing for the unanimous Court, Chief Justice Rehnquist rebuffed the Fifth Circuit’s effort to craft a standard for pleading municipal liability that accounted for “the enormous expense involved today in litigation,” Leatherman v. Tarrant County Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination Unit, 954 F. 2d 1054, 1057 (1992) (internal quotation marks omitted), by requiring a plaintiff to “state with factual detail and particularity the basis for the claim which necessarily includes why the defendant-official cannot successfully maintain the defense of immunity,” 507 U. S., at 167 (internal quotation marks omitted). We found this language inconsistent with Rules 8(a)(2) and 9(b) and emphasized that motions to dismiss were not the place to combat discovery abuse: “In the absence of [an amendment to Rule 9(b)], federal courts and litigants must rely on summary judgment and control of discovery to weed out unmeritorious claims sooner rather than later.” Id., at 168-169.

Most recently, in Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S. 506, we were faced with a case more similar to the present one than the majority will allow. In discrimination cases, our precedents require a plaintiff at the summary judgment stage to produce either direct evidence of discrimination or, if the claim is based primarily on circumstantial evidence, to meet the shifting evidentiary burdens imposed under the framework articulated in McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U. S. 792 (1973). See, e. g., Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Thur*585ston, 469 U. S. 111, 121 (1985). Swierkiewicz alleged that he had been terminated on account of national origin in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Second Circuit dismissed the suit on the pleadings because he had not pleaded a prima facie case of discrimination under the McDonnell Douglas standard.

We reversed in another unanimous opinion, holding that “under a notice pleading system, it is not appropriate to require a plaintiff to plead facts establishing a prima facie case because the McDonnell Douglas framework does not apply in every employment discrimination case.” Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 511. We also observed that Rule 8(a)(2) does not contemplate a court’s passing on the merits of a litigant’s claim at the pleading stage. Rather, the “simplified notice pleading standard” of the Federal Rules “relies on liberal discovery rules and summary judgment motions to define disputed facts and issues and to dispose of unmeritorious claims.” Id., at 512; see Brief for United States et al. as Amici Curiae in Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N. A, O. T. 2001, No. 00-1853, p. 10 (stating that a Rule 12(b)(6) motion is not “an appropriate device for testing the truth of what is asserted or for determining whether a plaintiff has any evidence to back up what is in the complaint” (internal quotation marks omitted)).7

As in the discrimination context, we have developed an evidentiary framework for evaluating claims under § 1 of the Sherman Act when those claims rest on entirely circumstantial evidence of conspiracy. See Matsushita Elec. Indus*586trial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U. S. 574 (1986). Under Matsushita, a plaintiff’s allegations of an illegal conspiracy may not, at the summary judgment stage, rest solely on the inferences that may be drawn from the parallel conduct of the defendants. In order to survive a Rule 56 motion, a § 1 plaintiff “must present evidence ‘that tends to exclude the possibility’ that the alleged conspirators acted independently.’” Id., at 588 (quoting Monsanto Co. v. Spray-Rite Service Corp., 465 U. S. 752, 764 (1984)). That is, the plaintiff “must show that the inference of conspiracy is reasonable in light of the competing inferences of independent action or collusive action.” 475 U. S., at 588.

Everything today’s majority says would therefore make perfect sense if it were ruling on a Rule 56 motion for summary judgment and the evidence included nothing more than the Court has described. But it should go without saying in the wake of Swierkiewicz that a heightened production burden at the summary judgment stage does not translate into a heightened pleading burden at the complaint stage. The majority rejects the complaint in this case because — in light of the fact that the parallel conduct alleged is consistent with ordinary market behavior — the claimed conspiracy is “conceivable” but not “plausible,” ante, at 570. I have my doubts about the majority’s assessment of the plausibility of this alleged conspiracy. See Part III, infra. But even if the majority’s speculation is correct, its “plausibility” standard is irreconcilable with Rule 8 and with our governing precedents. As we made clear in Swierkiewicz and Leatherman, fear of the burdens of litigation does not justify factual conclusions supported only by lawyers’ arguments rather than sworn denials or admissible evidence.

This case is a poor vehicle for the Court’s new pleading rule, for we have observed that “in antitrust cases, where ‘the proof is largely in the hands of the alleged conspirators,’ . . . dismissals prior to giving the plaintiff ample *587opportunity for discovery should be granted very sparingly.” Hospital Building Co. v. Trustees of Rex Hospital, 425 U. S. 738, 746 (1976) (quoting Poller v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 368 U. S. 464, 473 (1962)); see also Knuth v. Erie-Crawford Dairy Cooperative Assn., 395 F. 2d 420, 423 (CA3 1968) (“The ‘liberal’ approach to the consideration of antitrust complaints is important because inherent in such an action is the fact that all the details and specific facts relied upon cannot properly be set forth as part of the pleadings”). Moreover, the fact that the Sherman Act authorizes the recovery of treble damages and attorney’s fees for successful plaintiffs indicates that Congress intended to encourage, rather than discourage, private enforcement of the law. See Radovich v. National Football League, 352 U. S. 445, 454 (1957) (“Congress itself has placed the private antitrust litigant in a most favorable position .... In the face of such a policy this Court should not add requirements to burden the private litigant beyond what is specifically set forth by Congress in those laws”). It is therefore more, not less, important in antitrust cases to resist the urge to engage in armchair economics at the pleading stage.

The same year we decided Conley, Judge Clark wrote, presciently,

“I fear that every age must learn its lesson that special pleading cannot be made to do the service of trial and that live issues between active litigants are not to be disposed of or evaded on the paper pleadings, i. e., the formalistic claims of the parties. Experience has found no quick and easy short cut for trials in cases generally and antitrust cases in particular.” Special Pleading in the “Big Case”? in Procedure — The Handmaid of Justice 147, 148 (C. Wright & H. Reasoner eds. 1965) (hereinafter Clark, Special Pleading in the Big Case) (emphasis added).

*588In this “Big Case,” the Court succumbs to the temptation that previous Courts have steadfastly resisted.8 While the majority assures us that it is not applying any “‘heightened’ ” pleading standard, see ante, at 569, n. 14,1 shall now explain why I have a difficult time understanding its opinion any other way.

Ill

The Court does not suggest that an agreement to do what the plaintiffs allege would be permissible under the antitrust laws, see, e. g., Associated Gen. Contractors of Cal., Inc. v. Carpenters, 459 U. S. 519, 526-527 (1983). Nor does the Court hold that these plaintiffs have failed to allege an injury entitling them to sue for damages under those laws, see Brunswick Corp. v. Pueblo Bowl-O-Mat, Inc., 429 U. S. 477, 489-490 (1977). Rather, the theory on which the Court per*589mits dismissal is that, so far as the Federal Rules are concerned, no agreement has been alleged at all. This is a mind-boggling conclusion.

As the Court explains, prior to the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 the law prohibited the defendants from competing with each other. The new statute was enacted to replace a monopolistic market with a competitive one. The Act did not merely require the regional monopolists to take affirmative steps to facilitate entry to new competitors, see Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP, 540 U. S. 398, 402 (2004); it also permitted the existing firms to compete with each other and to expand their operations into previously forbidden territory. See 47 U. S. C. §271. Each of the defendants decided not to take the latter step. That was obviously an extremely important business decision, and I am willing to presume that each company acted entirely independently in reaching that decision. I am even willing to entertain the majority’s belief that any agreement among the companies was unlikely. But the plaintiffs allege in three places in their complaint, ¶¶ 4, 51, 64, App. 11, 27, 30, that the ILECs did in fact agree both to prevent competitors from entering into their local markets and to forgo competition with each other. And as the Court recognizes, at the motion to dismiss stage, a judge assumes “that all the allegations in the complaint are true (even if doubtful in fact).” Ante, at 555.

The majority circumvents this obvious obstacle to dismissal by pretending that it does not exist. The Court admits that “in form a few stray statements in the complaint speak directly of agreement,” but disregards those allegations by saying that “on fair reading these are merely legal conclusions resting on the prior allegations” of parallel conduct. Ante, at 564. The Court’s dichotomy between factual allegations and “legal conclusions” is the stuff of a bygone era, supra, at 574-576. That distinction was a defining feature of code pleading, see generally Clark, The Complaint in *590Code Pleading, 35 Yale L. J. 259 (1925-1926), but was conspicuously abolished when the Federal Rules were enacted in 1938. See United States v. Employing Plasterers Assn, of Chicago, 347 U. S. 186, 188 (1954) (holding, in an antitrust case, that the Government’s allegations of effects on interstate commerce must be taken into account in deciding whether to dismiss the complaint “[w]hether these charges be called ‘allegations of fact’ or ‘mere conclusions of the pleader’ ”); Brownlee v. Conine, 957 F. 2d 353, 354 (CA7 1992) (“The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure establish a system of notice pleading rather than of fact pleading, . . . so the happenstance that a complaint is ‘eonclusory,’ whatever exactly that overused lawyers’ cliché means, does not automatically condemn it”); Walker Distributing Co. v. Lucky Lager Brewing Co., 323 F. 2d 1, 3-4 (CA9 1963) (“[O]ne purpose of Rule 8 was to get away from the highly technical distinction between statements of fact and conclusions of law... ”); Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Int’l Union v. Delta, 277 F. 2d 694, 697 (CA6 1960) (“Under the notice system of pleading established by the Rules of Civil Procedure,. .. the ancient distinction between pleading ‘facts’ and ‘conclusions’ is no longer significant”); 5 Wright & Miller § 1218, at 267 (“[T]he federal rules do not prohibit the pleading of facts or legal conclusions as long as fair notice is given to the parties”). “Defendants entered into a contract” is no more a legal conclusion than “defendant negligently drove,” see Form 9; supra, at 575-576. Indeed it is less of one.9

*591Even if I were inclined to accept the Court’s anachronistic dichotomy and ignore the complaint’s actual allegations, I would dispute the Court’s suggestion that any inference of agreement from petitioners’ parallel conduct is “implausible.” Many years ago a truly great economist perceptively observed that “[pjeople of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” A. Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in 39 Great Books of the Western World 55 (R. Hutchins & M. Adler eds. 1952). I am not so cynical as to accept that sentiment at face value, but I need not do so here. Respondents’ complaint points not only to petitioners’ numerous opportunities to meet with each other, Complaint ¶ 46, App. 23,10 but also to Notebaert’s curious statement that encroaching on a fellow incumbent’s territory “might be a good way to turn a quick dollar but that doesn’t make it right,” id., ¶ 42, App. 22. What did he mean by that? One possible (indeed plausible) inference is that he meant that while it would be in his company’s economic self-interest to compete with its brethren, he had agreed with his competitors not to do so. According to the complaint, that is how the Illinois Coalition for Competitive Telecom construed Notebaert’s statement, id., ¶ 44, App. 22 (calling the statement “evidence of potential collusion among regional Bell phone monopolies to not com*592pete against one another and kill off potential competitors in local phone service”), and that is how Members of Congress construed his company’s behavior, id., ¶ 45, App. 23 (describing a letter to the Justice Department requesting an investigation into the possibility that the ILECs’ “ ‘very apparent non-competition policy’ ” was coordinated).

Perhaps Notebaert meant instead that competition would be sensible in the short term but not in the long run. That’s what his lawyers tell us anyway. See Brief for Petitioners 36. But I would think that no one would know better what Notebaert meant than Notebaert himself. Instead of permitting respondents to ask Notebaert, however, the Court looks to other quotes from that and other articles and decides that what he meant was that entering new markets as a competitive local exchange carrier would not be a “ ‘sustainable economic model.’ ” Ante, at 568, n. 13. Never mind that— as anyone ever interviewed knows — a newspaper article is hardly a verbatim transcript; the writer selects quotes to package his story, not to record a subject’s views for posterity. But more importantly the District Court was required at this stage of the proceedings to construe Notebaert’s ambiguous statement in the plaintiffs’ favor.11 See Allen v. Wright, 468 U. S. 737, 767-768, n. 1 (1984) (Brennan, J., dissenting). The inference the statement supports — that simultaneous decisions by ILECs not even to attempt to poach customers from one another once the law authorized them to *593do so were the product of an agreement — sits comfortably within the realm of possibility. That is all the Rules require.

To be clear, if I had been the trial judge in this case, I would not have permitted the plaintiffs to engage in massive discovery based solely on the allegations in this complaint. On the other hand, I surely would not have dismissed the complaint without requiring the defendants to answer the charge that they “have agreed not to compete with one another and otherwise allocated customers and markets to one another.”12 Complaint, ¶ 51, App. 27. Even a sworn denial of that charge would not justify a summary dismissal without giving the plaintiffs the opportunity to take depositions from Notebaert and at least one responsible executive representing each of the other defendants.

Respondents in this case proposed a plan of “ ‘phased discovery’” limited to the existence of the alleged conspiracy and class certification. Brief for Respondents 25-26. Two petitioners rejected the plan. Ibid. Whether or not respondents’ proposed plan was sensible, it was an appropriate subject for negotiation.13 Given the charge in the com*594plaint — buttressed by the common sense of Adam Smith— I cannot say that the possibility that joint discussions and perhaps some agreements played a role in petitioners’ decisionmaking process is so implausible that dismissing the complaint before any defendant has denied the charge is preferable to granting respondents even a minimal opportu*595nity to prove their claims. See Clark, New Federal Rules 977 (“[Tjhrough the weapons of discovery and summary judgment we have developed new devices, with more appropriate penalties to aid in matters of proof, and do not need to force the pleadings to their less appropriate function”).

I fear that the unfortunate result of the majority’s new pleading rule will be to invite lawyers’ debates over economic theory to conclusively resolve antitrust suits in the absence of any evidence. It is no surprise that the antitrust defense bar — among whom “lament” as to inadequate judicial supervision of discovery is most “common,” see ante, at 559 — should lobby for this state of affairs. But “we must recall that their primary responsibility is to win cases for their clients, not to improve law administration for the public.” Clark, Special Pleading in the Big Case 152. As we did in our prior decisions, we should have instructed them that their remedy was to seek to amend the Federal Rules— not our interpretation of them.14 See Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 515; Crawford-El v. Britton, 523 U. S. 574, 595 (1998); Leatherman, 507 U. S., at 168.

IV

Just a few weeks ago some of my colleagues explained that a strict interpretation of the literal text of statutory lan*596guage is essential to avoid judicial decisions that are not faithful to the intent of Congress, Zuni Public School Dist. No. 89 v. Department of Education, ante, p. 108 (Scalia, J., dissenting). I happen to believe that there are cases in which other tools of construction are more reliable than text, but I agree of course that congressional intent should guide us in matters of statutory interpretation. Ante, at 106 (Stevens, J., concurring). This is a case in which the intentions of the drafters of three important sources of law — the Sherman Act, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — all point unmistakably in the same direction, yet the Court marches resolutely the other way. Whether the Court’s actions will benefit only defendants in antitrust treble-damages cases, or whether its test for the sufficiency of a complaint will inure to the benefit of all civil defendants, is a question that the future will answer. But that the Court has announced a significant new rule that does not even purport to respond to any congressional command is glaringly obvious.

The transparent policy concern that drives the decision is the interest in protecting antitrust defendants — who in this case are some of the wealthiest corporations in our economy — from the burdens of pretrial discovery. Ante, at 558-560. Even if it were not apparent that the legal fees petitioners have incurred in arguing the merits of their Rule 12(b) motion have far exceeded the cost of limited discovery, or that those discovery costs would burden respondents as well as petitioners,15 that concern would not provide an adequate justification for this law-changing decision. For in the final analysis it is only a lack of confidence in the ability of trial judges to control discovery, buttressed by appellate judges’ independent appraisal of the plausibility of pro*597foundly serious factual allegations, that could account for this stark break from precedent.

If the allegation of conspiracy happens to be true, today’s decision obstructs the congressional policy favoring competition that undergirds both the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Sherman Act itself. More importantly, even if there is abundant evidence that the allegation is untrue, directing that the case be dismissed without even looking at any of that evidence marks a fundamental — and unjustified— change in the character of pretrial practice.

Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

*666Justice Kennedy

delivered the opinion of the Court.

Javaid Iqbal (hereinafter respondent) is a citizen of Pakistan and a Muslim. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks he was arrested in the United States on criminal charges and detained by federal officials. Respondent claims he was deprived of various constitutional protections while in federal custody. To redress the alleged deprivations, respondent filed a complaint against numerous federal officials, including John Ashcroft, the former Attorney General of the United States, and Robert Mueller, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Ashcroft and Mueller are the petitioners in the case now before us. As to these two petitioners, the complaint alleges that they adopted an unconstitutional policy that subjected respondent to harsh conditions of confinement on account of his race, religion, or national origin.

In the District Court petitioners raised the defense of qualified immunity and moved to dismiss the suit, contending the complaint was not sufficient to state a claim against them. The District Court denied the motion to dismiss, concluding the complaint was sufficient to state a claim despite petitioners’ official status at the times in question. Petitioners brought an interlocutory appeal in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The court, without discussion, assumed it had jurisdiction over the order denying the motion to dismiss; and it affirmed the District Court’s decision.

Respondent’s account of his prison ordeal could, if proved, demonstrate unconstitutional misconduct by some governmental actors. But the allegations and pleadings with respect to these actors are not before us here. This case instead turns on a narrower question: Did respondent, as the plaintiff in the District Court, plead factual matter that, if taken as true, states a claim that petitioners deprived him of his clearly established constitutional rights. We hold respondent’s pleadings are insufficient.

*667I

Following the 2001 attacks, the FBI and other entities within the Department of Justice began an investigation of vast reach to identify the assailants and prevent them from attacking anew. The FBI dedicated more than 4,000 special agents and 3,000 support personnel to the endeavor. By September 18 “the FBI had received more than 96,000 tips or potential leads from the public.” Dept, of Justice, Office of Inspector General, The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks 1,11-12 (Apr. 2003), http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/ special/0306/full.pdf?bcsi_scan_61073ECQF74759AD=0& bcsi_scan_filename=full.pdf (as visited May 14, 2009, and available in Clerk of Court’s case file).

In the ensuing months the FBI questioned more than 1,000 people with suspected links to the attacks in particular or to terrorism in general. Id., at 1. Of those individuals, some 762 were held on immigration charges; and a 184-member subset of that group was deemed to be “of ‘high interest’ ” to the investigation. Id., at 111. The high-interest detainees were held under restrictive conditions designed to prevent them from communicating with the general prison population or the outside world. Id., at 112-113.

Respondent was one of the detainees. According to his complaint, in November 2001 agents of the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested him on charges of fraud in relation to identification documents and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Iqbal v. Hasty, 490 F. 3d 143, 147-148 (CA2 2007). Pending trial for those crimes, respondent was housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York. Respondent was designated a person “of high interest” to the September 11 investigation and in January 2002 was placed in a section of the MDC known as the Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit *668(ADMAX SHU). Id., at 148. As the facility’s name indicates, the ADMAX SHU incorporates the maximum security conditions allowable under Federal Bureau of Prisons regulations. Ibid. ADMAX SHU detainees were kept in lock-down 23 hours a day, spending the remaining hour outside their cells in handcuffs and leg irons accompanied by a four-officer escort. Ibid.

Respondent pleaded guilty to the criminal charges, served a term of imprisonment, and was removed to his native Pakistan. Id., at 149. He then filed a Bivens action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York against 34 current and former federal officials and 19 “John Doe” federal corrections officers. See Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U. S. 388 (1971). The defendants range from the correctional officers who had day-to-day contact with respondent during the term of his confinement, to the wardens of the MDC facility, all the way to petitioners — officials who were at the highest level of the federal law enforcement hierarchy. First Amended Complaint in No. 04-CV-1809 (JG)(JA), ¶¶ 10-11, App. to Pet. for Cert. 157a (hereinafter Complaint).

The 21-cause-of-action complaint does not challenge respondent’s arrest or his confinement in the MDC’s general prison population. Rather, it concentrates on his treatment while confined to the ADMAX SHU. The complaint sets forth various claims against defendants who are not before us. For instance, the complaint alleges that respondent’s jailors “kicked him in the stomach, punched him in the face, and dragged him across” his cell without justification, id., ¶ 113, at 176a; subjected him to serial strip and body-cavity searches when he posed no safety risk to himself or others, id., ¶¶ 143-145, at 182a; and refiised to let him and other Muslims pray because there would be “[n]o prayers for terrorists,” id., ¶ 154, at 184a.

The allegations against petitioners are the only ones relevant here. The complaint contends that petitioners desig*669nated respondent a person of high interest on account of his race, religion, or national origin, in contravention of the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. The complaint alleges that “the [FBI], under the direction of Defendant MUELLER, arrested and detained thousands of Arab Muslim men ... as part of its investigation of the events of September 11.” Id., ¶ 47, at 164a. It further alleges that “[t]he policy of holding post-September-llth detainees in highly restrictive conditions of confinement until they were ‘cleared’ by the FBI was approved by Defendants ASHCROFT and MUELLER in discussions in the weeks after September 11, 2001.” Id., ¶ 69, at 168a. Lastly, the complaint posits that petitioners “each knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject” respondent to harsh conditions of confinement “as a matter of policy, solely on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest.” Id., ¶ 96, at 172a-173a. The pleading names Ashcroft as the “principal architect” of the policy, id., ¶ 10, at 157a, and identifies Mueller as “instrumental in [its] adoption, promulgation, and implementation,” id., ¶ 11, at 157a.

Petitioners moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state sufficient allegations to show their own involvement in clearly established unconstitutional conduct. The District Court denied their motion. Accepting all of the allegations in respondent’s complaint as true, the court held that “it cannot be said that there [is] no set of facts on which [respondent] would be entitled to relief as against” petitioners. Id., at 136a-137a (relying on Conley v. Gibson, 355 U. S. 41 (1957)). Invoking the collateral-order doctrine petitioners filed an interlocutory appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. While that appeal was pending, this Court decided Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U. S. 544 (2007), which discussed the standard for evaluating whether a complaint is sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss.

*670The Court of Appeals considered Twombly’s applicability to this case. Acknowledging that Twombly retired the Conley no-set-of-facts test relied upon by the District Court, the Court of Appeals’ opinion discussed at length how to apply this Court’s “standard for assessing the adequacy of pleadings.” 490 F. 3d, at 155. It concluded that Twombly called for a “flexible ‘plausibility standard,’ which obliges a pleader to amplify a claim with some factual allegations in those contexts where such amplification is needed to render the claim plausible” Id., at 157-158. The court found that petitioners’ appeal did not present one of “those contexts” requiring amplification. As a consequence, it held respondent’s pleading adequate to allege petitioners’ personal involvement in discriminatory decisions which, if true, violated clearly established constitutional law. Id., at 174.

Judge Cabranes concurred. He agreed that the majority’s “discussion of the relevant pleading standards reflected] the uneasy compromise . .. between a qualified immunity privilege rooted in the need to preserve the effectiveness of government as contemplated by our constitutional structure and the pleading requirements of Rule 8(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.” Id., at 178 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Judge Cabranes nonetheless expressed concern at the prospect of subjecting high-ranking Government officials — entitled to assert the defense of qualified immunity and charged with responding to “a national and international security emergency unprecedented in the history of the American Republic” — to the burdens of discovery on the basis of a complaint as nonspecific as respondent’s. Id., at 179. Reluctant to vindicate that concern as a member of the Court of Appeals, ibid., Judge Cabranes urged this Court to address the appropriate pleading standard “at the earliest opportunity,” id., at 178. We granted certiorari, 554 U. S. 902 (2008), and now reverse.

*671II

We first address whether the Court of Appeals had subject-matter jurisdiction to affirm the District Court’s order denying petitioners’ motion to dismiss. Respondent disputed subject-matter jurisdiction in the Court of Appeals, but the court hardly discussed the issue. We are not free to pretermit the question. Subject-matter jurisdiction cannot be forfeited or waived and should be considered when fairly in doubt. Arbaugh v.Y & H Corp., 546 U. S. 500, 514 (2006) (citing United States v. Cotton, 535 U. S. 625, 630 (2002)). According to respondent, the District Court’s order denying petitioners’ motion to dismiss is not appealable under the collateral-order doctrine. We disagree.

A

With exceptions inapplicable here, Congress has vested the courts of appeals with “jurisdiction of appeals from all final decisions of the district courts of the United States.” 28 U. S. C. § 1291. Though the statute’s finality requirement ensures that “interlocutory appeals — appeals before the end of district court proceedings — are the exception, not the rule,” Johnson v. Jones, 515 U. S. 304, 309 (1995), it does not prevent “review of all prejudgment orders,” Behrens v. Pelletier, 516 U. S. 299, 305 (1996). Under the collateral-order doctrine a limited set of district-court orders are reviewable “though short of final judgment.” Ibid. The orders within this narrow category “are immediately appeal-able because they ‘finally determine claims of right separable from, and collateral to, rights asserted in the action, too important to be denied review and too independent of the cause itself to require that appellate consideration be deferred until the whole case is adjudicated.’” Ibid, (quoting Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U. S. 541, 546 (1949)).

A district-court decision denying a Government officer’s claim of qualified immunity can fall within the narrow class *672of appealable orders despite “the absence of a final judgment.” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U. S. 511, 530 (1985). This is so because qualified immunity — which shields Government officials “from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights,” Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U. S. 800, 818 (1982) — is both a defense to liability and a limited “entitlement not to stand trial or face the other burdens of litigation.” Mitchell, 472 U. S., at 526. Provided it “turns on an issue of law,” id., at 530, a district-court order denying qualified immunity “ ‘conclusively determine^]’ ” that the defendant must bear the burdens of discovery; is “conceptually distinct from the merits of the plaintiff’s claim”; and would prove “effectively unreviewable on appeal from a final judgment,” id., at 527-528 (citing Cohen, supra, at 546). As a general matter, the collateral-order doctrine may have expanded beyond the limits dictated by its internal logic and the strict application of the criteria set out in Cohen. But the applicability of the doctrine in the context of qualified-immunity claims is well established; and this Court has been careful to say that a district court’s order rejecting qualified immunity at the motion-to-dismiss stage of a proceeding is a “final decision” within the meaning of § 1291. Behrens, 516 U. S., at 307.

B

Applying these principles, we conclude that the Court of Appeals had jurisdiction to hear petitioners’ appeal. The District Court’s order denying petitioners’ motion to dismiss turned on an issue of law and rejected the defense of qualified immunity. It was therefore a final decision “subject to immediate appeal.” Ibid. Respondent says that “a qualified immunity appeal based solely on the complaint's failure to state a claim, and not on the ultimate issues relevant to the qualified immunity defense itself, is not a proper subject of interlocutory jurisdiction.” Brief for Respondent Iqbal 15 (hereinafter Iqbal Brief). In other words, respondent *673contends the Court of Appeals had jurisdiction to determine whether his complaint avers a clearly established constitutional violation but that it lacked jurisdiction to pass on the sufficiency of his pleadings. Our opinions, however, make clear that appellate jurisdiction is not so strictly confined.

In Hartman v. Moore, 547 U. S. 250 (2006), the Court reviewed an interlocutory decision denying qualified immunity. The legal issue decided in Hartman concerned the elements a plaintiff “must plead and prove in order to win” a First Amendment retaliation claim. Id., at 257, n. 5. Similarly, two Terms ago in Wilkie v. Robbins, 551 U. S. 537 (2007), the Court considered another interlocutory order denying qualified immunity. The legal issue there was whether a Bivens action can be employed to challenge interference with property rights. 551 U. S., at 549, n. 4. These cases cannot be squared with respondent’s argument that the collateral-order doctrine restricts appellate jurisdiction to the “ultimate issu[e]” whether the legal wrong asserted was a violation of clearly established law while excluding the question whether the facts pleaded establish such a violation. Iqbal Brief 15. Indeed, the latter question is even more clearly within the category of appealable decisions than the questions presented in Hartman and Wilkie, since whether a particular complaint sufficiently alleges a clearly established violation of law cannot be decided in isolation from the facts pleaded. In that sense the sufficiency of respondent’s pleadings is both “inextricably intertwined with,” Swint v. Chambers County Comm’n, 514 U. S. 35, 51 (1995), and “directly implicated by,” Hartman, supra, at 257, n. 5, the qualified-immunity defense.

Respondent counters that our holding in Johnson, 515 U. S. 304, confirms the want of subject-matter jurisdiction here. That is incorrect. The allegation in Johnson was that five defendants, all of them police officers, unlawfully beat the plaintiff. Johnson considered “the appealability of a portion of” the District Court’s summary judgment order *674that, “though entered in a ‘qualified immunity’ case, determine[d] only” that there was a genuine issue of material fact that three of the defendants participated in the beating. Id., at 313.

In finding that order not a “final decision” for purposes of § 1291, the Johnson Court cited Mitchell for the proposition that only decisions turning “ ‘on an issue of law’ ” are subject to immediate appeal. 515 U. S., at 313. Though determining whether there is a genuine issue of material fact at summary judgment is a question of law, it is a legal question that sits near the law-fact divide. Or as we said in Johnson, it is a “fact-related” legal inquiry. Id., at 314. To conduct it, a court of appeals may be required to consult a “vast pretrial record, with numerous conflicting affidavits, depositions, and other discovery materials.” Id., at 316. That process generally involves matters more within a district court’s ken and may replicate inefficiently questions that will arise on appeal following final judgment. Ibid. Finding those concerns predominant, Johnson held that the collateral orders that are “final” under Mitchell turn on “abstract,” rather than “fact-based,” issues of law. 515 U. S., at 317.

The concerns that animated the decision in Johnson are absent when an appellate court considers the disposition of a motion to dismiss a complaint for insufficient pleadings. True, the categories of “fact-based” and “abstract” legal questions used to guide the Court’s decision in Johnson are not well defined. Here, however, the order denying petitioners’ motion to dismiss falls well within the latter class. Reviewing that order, the Court of Appeals considered only the allegations contained within the four corners of respondent’s complaint; resort to a “vast pretrial record” on petitioners’ motion to dismiss was unnecessary. Id., at 316. And determining whether respondent’s complaint has the “heft” to state a claim is a task well within an appellate court’s core competency. Twombly, 550 U. S., at 557. Evaluating the sufficiency of a complaint is not a “fact-based” question of law, so the problem the Court sought to avoid in Johnson *675is not implicated here. The District Court’s order denying petitioners’ motion to dismiss is a final decision under the collateral-order doctrine over which the Court of Appeals had, and this Court has, jurisdiction. We proceed to consider the merits of petitioners’ appeal.

Ill

In Twombly, supra, at 553-554, the Court found it necessary first to discuss the antitrust principles implicated by the complaint. Here too we begin by taking note of the elements a plaintiff must plead to state a claim of unconstitutional discrimination against officials entitled to assert the defense of qualified immunity.

In Bivens — proceeding on the theory that a right suggests a remedy — this Court “recognized for the first time an implied private action for damages against federal officers alleged to have violated a citizen’s constitutional rights.” Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko, 534 U. S. 61, 66 (2001). Because implied causes of action are disfavored, the Court has been reluctant to extend Bivens liability “to any new context or new category of defendants.” 534 U. S., at 68. See also Wilkie, 551 U. S., at 549-550. That reluctance might well have disposed of respondent’s First Amendment claim of religious discrimination. For while we have allowed a Bivens action to redress a violation of the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, see Davis v. Passman, 442 U. S. 228 (1979), we have not found an implied damages remedy under the Free Exercise Clause. Indeed, we have declined to extend Bivens to a claim sounding in the First Amendment. Bush v. Lucas, 462 U. S. 367 (1983). Petitioners do not press this argument, however, so we assume, without deciding, that respondent’s First Amendment claim is actionable under Bivens.

In the limited settings where Bivens does apply, the implied cause of action is the “federal analog to suits brought against state officials under Rev. Stat. § 1979, 42 U. S. C. *676§ 1983.” Hartman, 547 U. S., at 254, n. 2. Cf. Wilson v. Layne, 526 U. S. 603, 609 (1999). Based on the rules our precedents establish, respondent correctly concedes that Government officials may not be held liable for the unconstitutional conduct of their subordinates under a theory of respondeat superior. Iqbal Brief 46 (“[I]t is undisputed that supervisory Bivens liability cannot be established solely on a theory of respondeat superior”). See Monell v. New York City Dept. of Social Servs., 436 U. S. 658, 691 (1978) (finding no vicarious liability for a municipal “person” under 42 U. S. C. § 1983); see also Dunlop v. Munroe, 7 Cranch 242, 269 (1812) (a federal official’s liability “will only result from his own neglect in not properly superintending the discharge” of his subordinates’ duties); Robertson v. Sichel, 127 U. S. 507, 515-516 (1888) (“A public officer or agent is not responsible for the misfeasances or positive wrongs, or for the nonfeasances, or negligences, or omissions of duty, of the subagents or servants or other persons properly employed by or under him, in the discharge of his official duties”). Because vicarious liability is inapplicable to Bivens and § 1983 suits, a plaintiff must plead that each Government-official defendant, through the official's own individual actions, has violated the Constitution.

The factors necessary to establish a Bivens violation will vary with the constitutional provision at issue. Where the claim is invidious discrimination in contravention of the First and Fifth Amendments, our decisions make clear that the plaintiff must plead and prove that the defendant acted with discriminatory purpose. Church of Lukumi Bahalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U. S. 520, 540-541 (1993) (opinion of Kennedy, J.) (First Amendment); Washington v. Davis, 426 U. S. 229, 240 (1976) (Fifth Amendment). Under extant precedent purposeful discrimination requires more than “intent as volition or intent as awareness of consequences.” Personnel Administrator of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U. S. 256, 279 (1979). It instead involves a decisionmaker’s undertak*677ing a course of action “ ‘because of,’ not merely ‘in spite of,’ [the action’s] adverse effects upon an identifiable group.” Ibid. It follows that, to state a claim based on a violation of a clearly established right, respondent must plead sufficient factual matter to show that petitioners adopted and implemented the detention policies at issue not for a neutral, investigative reason but for the purpose of discriminating on account of race, religion, or national origin.

Respondent disagrees. He argues that, under a theory of “supervisory liability,” petitioners can be liable for “knowledge and acquiescence in their subordinates’ use of discriminatory criteria to make classification decisions among detainees.” Iqbal Brief 45-46. That is to say, respondent believes a supervisor’s mere knowledge of his subordinate’s discriminatory purpose amounts to the supervisor’s violating the Constitution. We reject this argument. Respondent’s conception of “supervisory liability” is inconsistent with his accurate stipulation that petitioners may not be held accountable for the misdeeds of their agents. In a § 1983 suit or a Bivens action — where masters do not answer for the torts of their servants — the term “supervisory liability” is a misnomer. Absent vicarious liability, each Government official, his or her title notwithstanding, is only liable for his or her own misconduct. In the context of determining whether there is a violation of a clearly established right to overcome qualified immunity, purpose rather than knowledge is required to impose Bivens liability on the subordinate for unconstitutional discrimination; the same holds true for an official charged with violations arising from his or her superintendent responsibilities.

IV

A

We turn to respondent’s complaint. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a)(2), a pleading must contain a “short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is *678entitled to relief.” As the Court held in Twombly, 550 U. S. 544, the pleading standard Rule 8 announces does not require “detailed factual allegations,” but it demands more than an unadorned, the-defendant-unlawfully-harmed-me accusation. Id., at 555 (citing Papasan v. Allain, 478 U. S. 265, 286 (1986)). A pleading that offers “labels and conclusions” or “a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do.” 550 U. S., at 555. Nor does a complaint suffice if it tenders “naked assertion[s]” devoid of “further factual enhancement.” Id., at 557.

To survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to “state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.” Id., at 570. A claim has facial plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged. Id., at 556. The plausibility standard is not akin to a “probability requirement,” but it asks for more than a sheer possibility that a defendant has acted unlawfully. Ibid. Where a complaint pleads facts that are “merely consistent with” a defendant’s liability, it “stops short of the line between possibility and plausibility of ‘entitlement to relief.’ ” Id., at 557 (brackets omitted).

Two working principles underlie our decision in Twombly. First, the tenet that a court must accept as true all of the allegations contained in a complaint is inapplicable to legal conclusions. Threadbare recitals of the elements of a cause of action, supported by mere conclusory statements, do not suffice. Id., at 555 (Although for the purposes of a motion to dismiss we must take all of the factual allegations in the complaint as true, we “are not bound to accept as true a legal conclusion couched as a factual allegation” (internal quotation marks omitted)). Rule 8 marks a notable and generous departure from the hyperteehnical, code-pleading regime of a prior era, but it does not unlock the doors of discovery for *679a plaintiff armed with nothing more than conclusions. Second, only a complaint that states a plausible claim for relief survives a motion to dismiss. Id., at 556. Determining whether a complaint states a plausible claim for relief will, as the Court of Appeals observed, be a context-specific task that requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense. 490 F. 3d, at 157-158. But where the well-pleaded facts do not permit the court to infer more than the mere possibility of misconduct, the complaint has alleged — but it has not “show[n]” — “that the pleader is entitled to relief.” Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 8(a)(2).

In keeping with these principles a court considering a motion to dismiss can choose to begin by identifying pleadings that, because they are no more than conclusions, are not entitled to the assumption of truth. While legal conclusions can provide the framework of a complaint, they must be supported by factual allegations. When there are well-pleaded factual allegations, a court should assume their veracity and then determine whether they plausibly give rise to an entitlement to relief.

Our decision in Twombly illustrates the two-pronged approach. There, we considered the sufficiency of a complaint alleging that incumbent telecommunications providers had entered an agreement not to compete and to forestall competitive entry, in violation of the Sherman Act, 15 U. S. C. § 1. Recognizing that § 1 enjoins only anticompetitive conduct “effected by a contract, combination, or conspiracy,” Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp., 467 U. S. 752, 775 (1984), the plaintiffs in Twombly flatly pleaded that the defendants “ha[d] entered into a contract, combination or conspiracy to prevent competitive entry . . . and ha[d] agreed not to compete with one another.” 550 U. S., at 551 (internal quotation marks omitted). The complaint also alleged that the defendants’ “parallel course of conduct... to prevent competition” and inflate prices was indicative of the *680unlawful agreement alleged. Ibid, (internal quotation marks omitted).

The Court held the plaintiffs’ complaint deficient under Rule 8. In doing so it first noted that the plaintiffs’ assertion of an unlawful agreement was a “ ‘legal conclusion’ ” and, as such, was not entitled to the assumption of truth. Id., at 555. Had the Court simply credited the allegation of a conspiracy, the plaintiffs would have stated a claim for relief and been entitled to proceed perforce. The Court next addressed the “nub” of the plaintiffs’ complaint — the well-pleaded, nonconclusory factual allegation of parallel behavior — to determine whether it gave rise to a “plausible suggestion of conspiracy.” Id., at 565-566. Acknowledging that parallel conduct was consistent with an unlawful agreement, the Court nevertheless concluded that it did not plausibly suggest an illicit accord because it was not only compatible with, but indeed was more likely explained by, lawful, unchoreographed free-market behavior. Id., at 567. Because the well-pleaded fact of parallel conduct, accepted as true, did not plausibly suggest an unlawful agreement, the Court held the plaintiffs’ complaint must be dismissed. Id., at 570.

B

Under Twombly’s, construction of Rule 8, we conclude that respondent’s complaint has not “nudged [his] claims” of invidious discrimination “across the line from conceivable to plausible.” Ibid.

We begin our analysis by identifying the allegations in the complaint that are not entitled to the assumption of truth. Respondent pleads that petitioners “knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject [him]” to harsh conditions of confinement “as a matter of policy, solely on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest.” Complaint ¶ 96, App. to Pet. for Cert. 173a-174a. The complaint alleges that Ashcroft was the “principal architect” of this invidious policy, *681id., ¶ 10, at 157a, and that Mueller was “instrumental” in adopting and executing it, id., ¶ 11, at 157a. These bare assertions, much like the pleading of conspiracy in Twombly, amount to nothing more than a “formulaic recitation of the elements” of a constitutional discrimination claim, 550 U. S., at 555, namely, that petitioners adopted a policy “‘because of,’ not merely ‘in spite of,’ its adverse effects upon an identifiable group,” Feeney, 442 U. S., at 279. As such, the allegations are conclusory and not entitled to be assumed true. Twombly, 550 U. S., at 554-555. To be clear, we do not reject these bald allegations on the ground that they are unrealistic or nonsensical. We do not so characterize them any more than the Court in Twombly rejected the plaintiffs’ express allegation of a “ ‘contract, combination or conspiracy to prevent competitive entry,’ ” id., at 551, because it thought that claim too chimerical to be maintained. It is the conclusory nature of respondent’s allegations, rather than their extravagantly fanciful nature, that disentitles them to the presumption of truth.

We next consider the factual allegations in respondent’s complaint to determine if they plausibly suggest an entitlement to relief. The complaint alleges that “the [FBI], under the direction of Defendant MUELLER, arrested and detained thousands of Arab Muslim men... as part of its investigation of the events of September 11.” Complaint ¶47, App. to Pet. for Cert. 164a. It further claims that “[t]he policy of holding post-September-llth detainees in highly restrictive conditions of confinement until they were ‘cleared’ by the FBI was approved by Defendants ASHCROFT and MUELLER in discussions in the weeks after September 11, 2001.” Id., ¶69, at 168a. Taken as true, these allegations are consistent with petitioners’ purposefully designating detainees “of high interest” because of their race, religion, or national origin. But given more likely explanations, they do not plausibly establish this purpose.

*682The September 11 attacks were perpetrated by 19 Arab Muslim hijackers who counted themselves members in good standing of al Qaeda, an Islamic fundamentalist group. A1 Qaeda was headed by another Arab Muslim' — Osama bin Laden — and composed in large part of his Arab Muslim disciples. It should come as no surprise that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims. On the facts respondent alleges the arrests Mueller oversaw were likely lawful and justified by his nondiscriminatory intent to detain aliens who were illegally present in the United States and who had potential connections to those who committed terrorist acts. As between that “obvious alternative explanation” for the arrests, Twombly, supra, at 567, and the purposeful, invidious discrimination respondent asks us to infer, discrimination is not a plausible conclusion.

But even if the complaint’s well-pleaded facts give rise to a plausible inference that respondent’s arrest was the result of unconstitutional discrimination, that inference alone would not entitle respondent to relief. It is important to recall that respondent’s complaint challenges neither the constitutionality of his arrest nor his initial detention in the MDC. Respondent’s constitutional claims against petitioners rest solely on their ostensible “policy of holding post-September-llth detainees” in the ADMAX SHU once they were categorized as “of high interest.” Complaint ¶69, App. to Pet. for Cert. 168a. To prevail on that theory, the complaint must contain facts plausibly showing that petitioners purposefully adopted a policy of classifying post-September-11 detainees as “of high interest” because of their race, religion, or national origin.

This the complaint fails to do. Though respondent alleges that various other defendants, who are not before us, may *683have labeled him a person “of high interest” for impermissible reasons, his only factual allegation against petitioners accuses them of adopting a policy approving “restrictive conditions of confinement” for post-September-11 detainees until they were “‘cleared’ by the FBI.” Ibid. Accepting the truth of that allegation, the complaint does not show, or even intimate, that petitioners purposefully housed detainees in the ADMAX SHU due to their race, religion, or national origin. All it plausibly suggests is that the Nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity. Respondent does not argue, nor can he, that such a motive would violate petitioners’ constitutional obligations. He would need to allege more by way of factual content to “nudg[e]” his claim of purposeful discrimination “across the line from conceivable to plausible.” Twombly, 550 U. S., at 570.

To be sure, respondent can attempt to draw certain contrasts between the pleadings the Court considered in Twombly and the pleadings at issue here. In Twombly, the complaint alleged general wrongdoing that extended over a period of years, id., at 551, whereas here the complaint alleges discrete wrongs — for instance, beatings — by lower level Government actors. The allegations here, if true, and if condoned by petitioners, could be the basis for some inference of wrongful intent on petitioners’ part. Despite these distinctions, respondent’s pleadings do not suffice to state a claim. Unlike in Twombly, where the doctrine of respondeat superior could bind the corporate defendant, here, as we have noted, petitioners cannot be held liable unless they themselves acted on account of a constitutionally protected characteristic. Yet respondent’s complaint does not contain any factual allegation sufficient to plausibly suggest petitioners’ discriminatory state of mind. His pleadings thus do not meet the standard necessary to comply with Rule 8.

*684It is important to note, however, that we express no opinion concerning the sufficiency of respondent’s complaint against the defendants who are not before us. Respondent’s account of his prison ordeal alleges serious official misconduct that we need not address here. Our decision is limited to the determination that respondent’s complaint does not entitle him to relief from petitioners.

C

Respondent offers three arguments that bear on our disposition of his case, but none is persuasive.

1

Respondent first says that our decision in Twombly should be limited to pleadings made in the context of an antitrust dispute. Iqbal Brief 37-38. This argument is not supported by Twombly and is incompatible with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Though Twombly determined the sufficiency of a complaint sounding in antitrust, the decision was based on our interpretation and application of Rule 8. 550 U. S., at 554. That Rule in turn governs the pleading standard “in all civil actions and proceedings in the United States district courts.” Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 1. Our decision in Twombly expounded the pleading standard for “all civil actions,” ibid., and it applies to antitrust and discrimination suits alike, see 550 U. S., at 555-556, and n. 3.

2

Respondent next implies that our construction of Rule 8 should be tempered where, as here, the Court of Appeals has “instructed the district court to cabin discovery in such a way as to preserve” petitioners’ defense of qualified immunity “as much as possible in anticipation of a summary judgment motion.” Iqbal Brief 27. We have held, however, that the question presented by a motion to dismiss a complaint for insufficient pleadings does not turn on the controls *685placed upon the discovery process. Twombly, supra, at 559 (“It is no answer to say that a claim just shy of a plausible entitlement to relief can, if groundless, be weeded out early in the discovery process through careful case management given the common lament that the success of judicial supervision in checking discovery abuse has been on the modest side” (internal quotation marks and citation omitted)).

Our rejection of the eareful-case-management approach is especially important in suits where Government-official defendants are entitled to assert the defense of qualified immunity. The basic thrust of the qualified-immunity doctrine is to free officials from the concerns of litigation, including “avoidance of disruptive discovery.” Siegert v. Gilley, 500 U. S. 226, 236 (1991) (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment). There are serious and legitimate reasons for this. If a Government official is to devote time to his or her duties, and to the formulation of sound and responsible policies, it is counterproductive to require the substantial diversion that is attendant to participating in litigation and making informed decisions as to how it should proceed. Litigation, though necessary to ensure that officials comply with the law, exacts heavy costs in terms of efficiency and expenditure of valuable time and resources that might otherwise be directed to the proper execution of the work of the Government. The costs of diversion are only magnified when Government officials are charged with responding to, as Judge Cabranes aptly put it, “a national and international security emergency unprecedented in the history of the American Republic.” 490 F. 3d, at 179.

It is no answer to these concerns to say that discovery for petitioners can be deferred while pretrial proceedings continue for other defendants. It is quite likely that, when discovery as to the other parties proceeds, it would prove necessary for petitioners and their counsel to participate in the process to ensure the case does not develop in a misleading or slanted way that causes prejudice to their position. Even *686if petitioners are not yet themselves subject to discovery orders, then, they would not be free from the burdens of discovery.

We decline respondent’s invitation to relax the pleading requirements on the ground that the Court of Appeals promises petitioners minimally intrusive discovery. That promise provides especially cold comfort in this pleading context, where we are impelled to give real content to the concept of qualified immunity for high-level officials who must be neither deterred nor detracted from the vigorous performance of their duties. Because respondent’s complaint is deficient under Rule 8, he is not entitled to discovery, cabined or otherwise.

3

Respondent finally maintains that the Federal Rules expressly allow him to allege petitioners’ discriminatory intent “generally,” which he equates with a conclusory allegation. Iqbal Brief 32 (citing Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 9). It follows, respondent says, that his complaint is sufficiently well pleaded because it claims that petitioners discriminated against him “on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest.” Complaint ¶96, App. to Pet. for Cert. 172a-173a. Were we required to accept this allegation as true, respondent’s complaint would survive petitioners’ motion to dismiss. But the Federal Rules do not require courts to credit a complaint’s conclusory statements without reference to its factual context.

It is true that Rule 9(b) requires particularity when pleading “fraud or mistake,” while allowing “[mjalice, intent, knowledge, and other conditions of a person’s mind [to] be alleged generally.” But “generally” is a relative term. In the context of Rule 9, it is to be compared to the particularity requirement applicable to fraud or mistake. Rule 9 merely excuses a party from pleading discriminatory intent under an elevated pleading standard. It does not give him license *687to evade the less rigid — though still operative — strictures of Rule 8. See 5A C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1301, p. 291 (3d ed. 2004) (“[A] rigid rule requiring the detailed pleading of a condition of mind would be undesirable because, absent overriding considerations pressing for a specificity requirement, as in the case of averments of fraud or mistake, the general ‘short and plain statement of the claim’ mandate in Rule 8(a) . . . should control the second sentence of Rule 9(b)”). And Rule 8 does not empower respondent to plead the bare elements of his cause of action, affix the label “general allegation,” and expect his complaint to survive a motion to dismiss.

V

We hold that respondent’s complaint fails to plead sufficient facts to state a claim for purposeful and unlawful discrimination against petitioners. The Court of Appeals should decide in the first instance whether to remand to the District Court so that respondent can seek leave to amend his deficient complaint.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Justice Souter, with whom Justice Stevens, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer join, dissenting.

This case is here on the uncontested assumption that Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U. S. 388 (1971), allows personal liability based on a federal officer’s violation of an individual’s rights under the First and Fifth Amendments, and it comes to us with the explicit concession of petitioners Ashcroft and Mueller that an officer may be subject to Bivens liability as a supervisor on grounds other than respondeat superior. The Court apparently rejects this concession and, although it has no bearing on the ma*688jority’s resolution of this case, does away with supervisory liability under Bivens. The majority then misapplies the pleading standard under Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U. S. 544 (2007), to conclude that the complaint fails to state a claim. I respectfully dissent from both the rejection of supervisory liability as a cognizable claim in the face of petitioners’ concession, and from the holding that the complaint fails to satisfy Rule 8(a)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

I

A

Respondent Iqbal was arrested in November 2001 on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and fraud in relation to identification documents, and was placed in pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York. Iqbal v. Hasty, 490 F. 3d 143, 147-148 (CA2 2007). He alleges that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials carried out a discriminatory policy by designating him as a person “ 'of high interest’ ” in the investigation of the September 11 attacks solely because of his race, religion, or national origin. Owing to this designation he was placed in the detention center’s Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit for over six months while awaiting the fraud trial. Id., at 148. As I will mention more fully below, Iqbal contends that Ashcroft and Mueller were at the very least aware of the discriminatory detention policy and condoned it (and perhaps even took part in devising it), thereby violating his First and Fifth Amendment rights.1

Iqbal claims that on the day he was transferred to the special unit, prison guards, without provocation, “picked him up and threw him against the wall, kicked him in the stom*689ach, punched him in the face, and dragged him across the room.” First Amended Complaint in No. 04-CV-1809 (JG) (JA), ¶ 113, App. to Pet. for Cert. 176a (hereinafter Complaint). He says that after being attacked a second time he sought medical attention but was denied care for two weeks. Id., ¶¶ 187-188, at 189a. According to Iqbal’s complaint, prison staff in the special unit subjected him to unjustified strip and body cavity searches, id., ¶¶ 136-140, at 181a, verbally berated him as a “ ‘terrorist’ ” and “ ‘Muslim killer,’ ” id., ¶87, at 170a-171a, refused to give him adequate food, id., ¶ 91, at 171a-172a, and intentionally turned on air conditioning during the winter and heating during the summer, id., ¶ 84, at 170a. He claims that prison staff interfered with his attempts to pray and engage in religious study, id., ¶¶ 153-154, at 183a-184a, and with his access to counsel, id., ¶¶ 168, 171, at 186a-187a.

The District Court denied Ashcroft and Mueller’s motion to dismiss Iqbal’s discrimination claim, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. Ashcroft and Mueller then asked this Court to grant certiorari on two questions:

“1. Whether a conclusory allegation that a cabinet-level officer or other high-ranking official knew of, condoned, or agreed to subject a plaintiff to allegedly unconstitutional acts purportedly committed by subordinate officials is sufficient to state individual-capacity claims against those officials under Bivens.

“2. Whether a cabinet-level officer or other high-ranking official may be held personally liable for the allegedly unconstitutional acts of subordinate officials on the ground that, as high-level supervisors, they had constructive notice of the discrimination allegedly carried out by such subordinate officials.” Pet. for Cert. I.

The Court granted certiorari on both questions. The first is about pleading; the second goes to the liability standard.

*690In the first question, Ashcroft and Mueller did not ask whether “a cabinet-level officer or other high-ranking official” who “knew of, condoned, or agreed to subject a plaintiff to allegedly unconstitutional acts committed by subordinate officials” was subject to liability under Bivens. In fact, they conceded in their petition for certiorari that they would be liable if they had “actual knowledge” of discrimination by their subordinates and exhibited “‘deliberate indifference’” to that discrimination. Pet. for Cert. 29 (quoting Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U. S. 825, 837 (1994)). Instead, they asked the Court to address whether Iqbal’s allegations against them (which they call conclusory) were sufficient to satisfy Rule 8(a)(2), and in particular whether the Court of Appeals misapplied our decision in Twombly construing that rule. Pet. for Cert. 11-24.

In the second question, Ashcroft and Mueller asked this Court to say whether they could be held personally liable for the actions of their subordinates based on the theory that they had constructive notice of their subordinates’ unconstitutional conduct. Id., at 25-33. This was an odd question to pose, since Iqbal has never claimed that Ashcroft and Mueller are liable on a constructive, notice theory. Be that as it may, the second question challenged only one possible ground for imposing supervisory liability under Bivens. In sum, both questions assumed that a defendant could raise a Bivens claim on theories of supervisory liability other than constructive notice, and neither question asked the parties or the Court to address the elements of such liability.

The briefing at the merits stage was no different. Ashcroft and Mueller argued that the factual allegations in Iqbal’s complaint were insufficient to overcome their claim of qualified immunity; they also contended that they could not be held liable on a theory of constructive notice. Again they conceded, however, that they would be subject to supervisory liability if they “had actual knowledge of the assertedly discriminatory nature of the classification of suspects as *691being ‘of high interest’ and they were deliberately indifferent to that discrimination.” Brief for Petitioners 50; see also Reply Brief for Petitioners 21-22. Iqbal argued that the allegations in his complaint were sufficient under Rule 8(a)(2) and Twombly, and conceded that as a matter of law he could not recover under a theory of respondeat superior. See Brief for Respondent Iqbal 46. Thus, the parties agreed as to a proper standard of supervisory liability, and the disputed question was whether Iqbal’s complaint satisfied Rule 8(a)(2).

Without acknowledging the parties’ agreement as to the standard of supervisory liability, the Court asserts that it must sua sponte decide the scope of supervisory liability here. Ante, at 675-677. I agree that, absent Ashcroft and Mueller’s concession, that determination would have to be made; without knowing the elements of a supervisory liability claim, there would be no way to determine whether a plaintiff had made factual allegations amounting to grounds for relief on that claim. See Twombly, 550 U. S., at 557-558. But deciding the scope of supervisory Bivens liability in this case is uncalled for. There are several reasons, starting with the position Ashcroft and Mueller have taken and following from it.

First, Ashcroft and Mueller have, as noted, made the critical concession that a supervisor’s knowledge of a subordinate’s unconstitutional conduct and deliberate indifference to that conduct are grounds for Bivens liability. Iqbal seeks to recover on a theory that Ashcroft and Mueller at least knowingly acquiesced (and maybe more than acquiesced) in the discriminatory acts of their subordinates; if he can show this, he will satisfy Ashcroft and Mueller’s own test for supervisory liability. See Farmer, supra, at 842 (explaining that a prison official acts with “deliberate indifference” if “the official acted or failed to act despite his knowledge of a substantial risk of serious harm”). We do not normally override a party’s concession, see, e. g., United States v. International Business Machines Corp., 517 U. S. 843, 855 *692(1996) (holding that “[i]t would be inappropriate for us to [ejxamine in this ease, without the benefit of the parties’ briefing,” an issue the Government had conceded), and doing so is especially inappropriate when, as here, the issue is unnecessary to decide the case, see infra, at 694. I would therefore accept Ashcroft and Mueller’s concession for purposes of this case and proceed to consider whether the complaint alleges at least knowledge and deliberate indifference.

Second, because of the concession, we have received no briefing or argument on the proper scope of supervisory liability, much less the full-dress argument we normally require. Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643, 676-677 (1961) (Harlan, J., dissenting). We consequently are in no position to decide the precise contours of supervisory liability here, this issue being a complicated one that has divided the Courts of Appeals. See infra, at 693-694. This Court recently remarked on the danger of “bad decisionmaking” when the briefing on a question is “woefully inadequate,” Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U. S. 223, 239 (2009), yet today the majority answers a question with no briefing at all. The attendant risk of error is palpable.

Finally, the Court’s approach is most unfair to Iqbal. He was entitled to rely on Ashcroft and Mueller’s concession, both in their petition for certiorari and in their merits briefs, that they could be held liable on a theory of knowledge and deliberate indifference. By overriding that concession, the Court denies Iqbal a fair chance to be heard on the question.

B

The majority, however, does ignore the concession. According to the majority, because Iqbal concededly cannot recover on a theory of respondeat superior, it follows that he cannot recover under any theory of supervisory liability. Ante, at 677. The majority says that in a Bivens action, “where masters do not answer for the torts of their servants,” “the term ‘supervisory liability’ is a misnomer,” and *693that “[a]bsent vicarious liability, each Government official, his or her title notwithstanding, is only liable for his or her own misconduct.” Ibid. Lest there be any mistake, in these words the majority is not narrowing the scope of supervisory liability; it is eliminating Bivens supervisory liability entirely. The nature of a supervisory liability theory is that the supervisor may be liable, under certain conditions, for the wrongdoing of his subordinates, and it is this very principle that the majority rejects. Ante, at 683 (“[Petitioners cannot be held liable unless they themselves acted on account of a constitutionally protected characteristic”).

The dangers of the majority’s readiness to proceed without briefing and argument are apparent in its cursory analysis, which rests on the assumption that only two outcomes are possible here: respondeat superior liability, in which “[a]n employer is subject to liability for torts committed by employees while acting within the scope of their employment,” Restatement (Third) of Agency §2.04 (2005), or no supervisory liability at all. The dichotomy is false. Even if an employer is not liable for the actions of his employee solely because the employee was acting within the scope of employment, there still might be conditions to render a supervisor liable for the conduct of his subordinate. See, e. g., Whitfield v. Melendez-Rivera, 431 F. 3d 1, 14 (CA1 2005) (distinguishing between respondeat superior liability and supervisory liability); Bennett v. Eastpointe, 410 F. 3d 810, 818 (CA6 2005) (same); Richardson v. Goord, 347 F. 3d 431, 435 (CA2 2003) (same); Hall v. Lombardi, 996 F. 2d 954, 961 (CA8 1993) (same).

In fact, there is quite a spectrum of possible tests for supervisory liability: it could be imposed where a supervisor has actual knowledge of a subordinate’s constitutional violation and acquiesces, see, e. g., Baker v. Monroe Twp., 50 F. 3d 1186, 1994 (CA3 1995); Woodward v. Worland, 977 F. 2d 1392, 1400 (CA10 1992); or where supervisors “‘know about the conduct and facilitate it, approve it, condone it, or turn a *694blind eye for fear of what they might see,’ ” International Action Center v. United States, 365 F. 3d 20, 28 (CADC 2004) (Roberts, J.) (quoting Jones v. Chicago, 856 F. 2d 985, 992 (CA7 1988) (Posner, J.)); or where the supervisor has no actual knowledge of the violation but was reckless in his supervision of the subordinate, see, e. g., Hall, supra, at 961; or where the supervisor was grossly negligent, see, e. g., Lipsett v. University of Puerto Rico, 864 F. 2d 881, 902 (CA1 1988). I am unsure what the general test for supervisory liability should be, and in the absence of briefing and argument I am in no position to choose or devise one.

Neither is the majority, but what is most remarkable about its foray into supervisory liability is that its conclusion has no bearing on its resolution of the case. The majority says that all of the allegations in the complaint that Ashcroft and Mueller authorized, condoned, or even were aware of their subordinates’ discriminatory conduct are “conclusory” and therefore are “not entitled to be assumed true.” Ante, at 681. As I explain below, this conclusion is unsound, but on the majority’s understanding of Rule 8(a)(2) pleading standards, even if the majority accepted Ashcroft and Mueller’s concession and asked whether the complaint sufficiently alleges knowledge and deliberate indifference, it presumably would still conclude that the complaint fails to plead sufficient facts and must be dismissed.2

II

Given petitioners’ concession, the complaint satisfies Rule 8(a)(2). Ashcroft and Mueller admit they are liable for their subordinates’ conduct if they “had actual knowledge of the assertedly discriminatory nature of the classification of sus*695pects as being 'of high interest’ and they were deliberately indifferent to that discrimination.” Brief for Petitioners 50. Iqbal alleges that after the September 11 attacks the FBI “arrested and detained thousands of Arab Muslim men,” Complaint ¶47, App. to Pet. for Cert. 164a, that many of these men were designated by high-ranking FBI officials as being “'of high interest,’” id., ¶¶48, 50, at 164a, and that in many cases, including Iqbal’s, this designation was made “because of the race, religion, and national origin of the detainees, and not because of any evidence of the detainees’ involvement in supporting terrorist activity,” id., ¶49, at 164a. The complaint further alleges that Ashcroft was the “principal architect of the policies and practices challenged,” id., ¶ 10, at 157a, and that Mueller “was instrumental in the adoption, promulgation, and implementation of the policies and practices challenged,” id., ¶ 11, at 157a. According to the complaint, Ashcroft and Mueller “knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject [Iqbal] to these conditions of confinement as a matter of policy, solely on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest.” Id., ¶ 96, at 172a-173a. The complaint thus alleges, at a bare minimum, that Ashcroft and Mueller knew of and condoned the discriminatory policy their subordinates carried out. Actually, the complaint goes further in alleging that Ashcroft and Mueller affirmatively acted to create the discriminatory detention policy. If these factual allegations are true, Ashcroft and Mueller were, at the very least, aware of the discriminatory policy being implemented and deliberately indifferent to it.

Ashcroft and Mueller argue that these allegations fail to satisfy the “plausibility standard” of Twombly. They contend that Iqbal’s claims are implausible because such high-ranking officials “tend not to be personally involved in the specific actions of lower-level officers down the bureaucratic chain of command.” Brief for Petitioners 28. But this response bespeaks a fundamental misunderstanding of the en*696quiry that Twombly demands. Twombly does not require a court at the motion-to-dismiss stage to consider whether the factual allegations are probably true. We made it clear, on the contrary, that a court must take the allegations as true, no matter how skeptical the court may be. See 550 U. S., at 555 (a court must proceed “on the assumption that all the allegations in the complaint are true (even if doubtful in fact)”); id., at 556 (“[A] well-pleaded complaint may proceed even if it strikes a savvy judge that actual proof of the facts alleged is improbable”); see also Neitzke v. Williams, 490 U. S. 319, 327 (1989) (“Rule 12(b)(6) does not countenance ... dismissals based on a judge’s disbelief of a complaint’s factual allegations”). The sole exception to this rule lies with allegations that are sufficiently fantastic to defy reality as we know it: claims about little green men, or the plaintiff’s recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel. That is not what we have here.

Under Twombly, the relevant question is whether, assuming the factual allegations are true, the plaintiff has stated a ground for relief that is plausible. That is, in Twombly’s words, a plaintiff must “allege facts” that, taken as true, are “suggestive of illegal conduct.” 550 U. S., at 564, n. 8. In Twombly, we were faced with allegations of a conspiracy to violate §1 of the Sherman Act through parallel conduct. The difficulty was that the conduct alleged was “consistent with conspiracy, but just as much in line with a wide swath of rational and competitive business strategy unilaterally prompted by common perceptions of the market.” Id., at 554. We held that in that sort of circumstance, “[a]n allegation of parallel conduct is ... much like a naked assertion of conspiracy in a § 1 complaint: it gets the complaint close to stating a claim, but without some further factual enhancement it stops short of the line between possibility and plausibility of ‘entitlement to relief.’ ” Id., at 557 (brackets omitted). Here, by contrast, the allegations in the complaint are neither confined to naked legal conclusions nor consistent *697with legal conduct. The complaint alleges that FBI officials discriminated against Iqbal solely on account of his race, religion, and national origin, and it alleges the knowledge and deliberate indifference that, by Ashcroft and Mueller’s own admission, are sufficient to make them liable for the illegal action. Iqbal’s complaint therefore contains “enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.” Id., at 570.

I do not understand the majority to disagree with this understanding of “plausibility” under Twombly. Rather, the majority discards the allegations discussed above with regard to Ashcroft and Mueller as conclusory, and is left considering only two statements in the complaint: that “the [FBI], under the direction of Defendant MUELLER, arrested and detained thousands of Arab Muslim men ... as part of its investigation of the events of September 11,” Complaint ¶ 47, App. to Pet. for Cert. 164a, and that “[t]he policy of holding post-September-llth detainees in highly restrictive conditions of confinement until they were ‘cleared’ by the FBI was approved by Defendants ASHCROFT and MUELLER in discussions in the weeks after September 11, 2001,” id., ¶ 69, at 168a. See ante, at 681. I think the majority is right in saying that these allegations suggest only that Ashcroft and Mueller “sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity,” ante, at 683, and that this produced “a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims,” ante, at 682. And I agree that the two allegations selected by the majority, standing alone, do not state a plausible entitlement to relief for unconstitutional discrimination.

But these allegations do not stand alone as the only significant, nonconclusory statements in the complaint, for the complaint contains many allegations linking Ashcroft and Mueller to the discriminatory practices of their subordinates. See Complaint ¶ 10, App. to Pet. for Cert. 157a (Ashcroft was the “principal architect” of the discriminatory policy); *698id., ¶ 11, at 157a (Mueller was “instrumentar’ in adopting and executing the discriminatory policy); id., ¶ 96, at 172a-173a (Ashcroft and Mueller “knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject” Iqbal to harsh conditions “as a matter of policy, solely on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest”).

The majority says that these are “bare assertions” that, “much like the pleading of conspiracy in Twombly, amount to nothing more than a ‘formulaic recitation of the elements’ of a constitutional discrimination claim” and therefore are “not entitled to be assumed true.” Ante, at 681 (quoting Twombly, supra, at 555). The fallacy of the majority’s position, however, lies in looking at the relevant assertions in isolation. The complaint contains specific allegations that, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Chief of the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Section and the Assistant Special Agent in Charge for the FBI’s New York Field Office implemented a policy that discriminated against Arab Muslim men, including Iqbal, solely on account of their race, religion, or national origin. See Complaint ¶¶ 47-53, supra, at 164a-165a. Viewed in light of these subsidiary allegations, the allegations singled out by the majority as “eonclusory” are no such thing. Iqbal’s claim is not that Ashcroft and Mueller “knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject” him to a discriminatory practice that is left undefined; his allegation is that “they knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject” him to a particular, discrete, discriminatory policy detailed in the complaint. Iqbal does not say merely that Ashcroft was the architect of some amorphous discrimination, or that Mueller was instrumental in an ill-defined constitutional violation; he alleges that they helped to create the discriminatory policy he has described. Taking the complaint as a whole, it gives Ashcroft and Mueller “ ‘fair notice of what the . . . claim is and the grounds upon which it *699rests.’” Twombly, 550 U. S., at 555 (quoting Conley v. Gibson, 355 U. S. 41, 47 (1957) (omission in original)).

That aside, the majority’s holding that the statements it selects are conclusory cannot be squared with its treatment of certain other allegations in the complaint as noneonclusory. For example, the majority takes as true the statement that “[t]he policy of holding post-September-11th detainees in highly restrictive conditions of confinement until they were ‘cleared’ by the FBI was approved by Defendants ASHCROFT and MUELLER in discussions in the weeks after September 11, 2001.” Complaint ¶ 69, supra, at 168a; see ante, at 681. This statement makes two points: (1) after September 11, the FBI held certain detainees in highly restrictive conditions, and (2) Ashcroft and Mueller discussed and approved these conditions. If, as the majority says, these allegations are not conclusory, then I cannot see why the majority deems it merely conclusory when Iqbal alleges that (1) after September 11, the FBI designated Arab Muslim detainees as being of “ ‘high interest’ ” “because of the race, religion, and national origin of the detainees, and not because of any evidence of the detainees’ involvement in supporting terrorist activity,” Complaint ¶¶ 48-50, App. to Pet. for Cert. 164a, and (2) Ashcroft and Mueller “knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed” to that discrimination, id., ¶ 96, at 172a. By my lights, there is no principled basis for the majority’s disregard of the allegations linking Ashcroft and Mueller to their subordinates’ discrimination.

I respectfully dissent.

Justice Breyer,

dissenting.

I agree with Justice Souter and join his dissent. I write separately to point out that, like the Court, I believe it important to prevent unwarranted litigation from interfering with “the proper execution of the work of the Government.” Ante, at 685. But I cannot find in that need adequate justification for the Court’s interpretation of Bell *700Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U. S. 544 (2007), and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8. The law, after all, provides trial courts with other legal weapons designed to prevent unwarranted interference. As the Second Circuit explained, where a Government defendant asserts a qualified immunity defense, a trial court, responsible for managing a case and “mindful of the need to vindicate the purpose of the qualified immunity defense,” can structure discovery in ways that diminish the risk of imposing unwarranted burdens upon public officials. See Iqbal v. Hasty, 490 F. 3d 143, 158 (2007). A district court, for example, can begin discovery with lower level Government defendants before determining whether a case can be made to allow discovery related to higher level Government officials. See ibid. Neither the briefs nor the Court’s opinion provides convincing grounds for finding these alternative case-management tools inadequate, either in general or in the case before us. For this reason, as well as for the independently sufficient reasons set forth in Justice Souter’s opinion, I would affirm the Second Circuit.

Mr. Justice Marshall

delivered the opinion of the Court.

The question presented is whether, in an action brought under 42 U. S. C. § 1983 against a public official whose position might entitle him to qualified immunity, a plaintiff must *636allege that the official has acted in bad faith in order to state a claim for relief or, alternatively, whether the defendant must plead good faith as an affirmative defense.

I

Petitioner Carlos Rivera Gomez brought this action against respondent, the Superintendent of the Police of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, contending that respondent had violated his right to procedural due process by discharging him from employment with the Police Department’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation.1 Basing jurisdiction on 28 U. S. C. § 1343 (3),2 petitioner alleged the following facts in his complaint.3 Petitioner had been employed as an agent with the Puerto Rican police since 1968. In April 1975, he submitted a sworn statement to his supervisor in which he asserted that two other agents had offered false evidence for use in a criminal case under their investigation. As a result of this statement, petitioner was immediately transferred from the Criminal Investigation Corps for the Southern Area to Police Headquarters in San Juan, and a few weeks later to the Police Academy in Gurabo, where he was given no investigative authority. In the meantime respondent ordered an investigation of petitioner’s claims, and the Legal Division of *637the Police Department concluded that all of petitioner's factual allegations were true.

In April 1976, while still stationed at the Police Academy, petitioner was subpoenaed to give testimony in a criminal case arising out of the evidence that petitioner had alleged to be false. At the trial petitioner, appearing as a defense witness, testified that the evidence was in fact false. As a result of this testimony, criminal charges, filed on the basis of information furnished by respondent, were brought against petitioner for the allegedly unlawful wiretapping pf the agents’ telephones. Respondent suspended petitioner in May 1976 and discharged him without a hearing in July. In October, the District Court of Puerto Rico found no probable cause to believe that petitioner was guilty of the allegedly unlawful wiretapping and, upon appeal by the prosecution, the Superior Court affirmed. Petitioner in turn sought review of his discharge before the Investigation, Prosecution, and Appeals Commission of Puerto Rico, which, after a hearing, revoked the discharge order rendered by respondent and ordered that petitioner be reinstated with backpay.

Based on the foregoing factual allegations, petitioner brought this suit for damages, contending that his discharge violated his right to procedural due process, and that it had caused him anxiety, embarrassment, and injury to his reputation in the community. In his answer, respondent denied a number of petitioner’s allegations of fact and asserted several affirmative defenses. Respondent then moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a cause of action, see Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 12(b)(6), and the District Court granted the motion. Observing that respondent was entitled to qualified immunity for acts done in good faith within the scope of his official duties, it concluded that petitioner was required to plead as part of his claim for relief that, in committing the actions alleged, respondent was motivated by bad faith. The absence of any such allegation, it held, required dismissal of *638the complaint. The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed. 602 F. 2d 1018 (1979).4

We granted certiorari to resolve a conflict among the Courts of Appeals.5 444 U. S. 1031 (1980). We now reverse.

II

Section 1983 provides a cause of action for “the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws” by any person acting “under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory.” 42 U. S. C. § 1983.6 This statute, enacted to aid in “ The preservation of human liberty and human rights,’ ” Owen v. City of Independence, 445 U. S. 622, 636 (1980), quoting Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 1st Sess., App. 68 *639(1871) (Rep. Shellabarger), reflects a congressional judgment that a “damages remedy against the offending party is a vital component of any scheme for vindicating cherished constitutional guarantees,” 445 U. S., at 651. As remedial legislation, § 1983 is to be construed generously to further its primary purpose. See 445 U. S., at 636.

In certain limited circumstances, we have held that public officers are entitled to a qualified immunity from damages liability under § 1983. This conclusion has been based on an unwillingness to infer from legislative silence a congressional intention to abrogate immunities that were both “well established at common law” and “compatible with the purposes of the Civil Rights Act.” 445 U. S., at 638. Findings of immunity have thus been “predicated upon a considered inquiry into the immunity historically accorded the relevant official at common law and the interests behind it.” Imbler v. Pachtman, 424 U. S. 409, 421 (1976). In Pierson v. Ray, 386 U. S. 547, 555 (1967), for example, we concluded that a police officer would be “excus[ed] from liability for acting under a statute that he reasonably believed to be valid but that was later held unconstitutional, on its face or as applied.” And in other contexts we have held, on the basis of “[c]ommon-law tradition . . . and strong public-policy reasons,” Wood v. Strickland, 420 U. S. 308, 318 (1975), that certain categories of executive officers should be allowed qualified immunity from liability for acts done on the basis of an objectively reasonable belief that those acts were lawful. See Procunier v. Navarette, 434 U. S. 555 (1978) (prison officials); O’Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U. S. 563 (1975) (superintendent of state hospital); Wood v. Strickland, supra (local school board members); Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U. S. 232 (1974) (state Governor and other executive officers). Cf. Owen v. City of Independence, supra (no qualified immunity for municipalities).

Nothing in the language or legislative history of § 1983, *640however, suggests that in an action brought against a public official whose position might entitle him to immunity if he acted in good faith, a plaintiff must allege bad faith in order to state a claim for relief. By the plain terms of § 1983, two — and only two — allegations are required in order to state a cause of action under that statute. First, the plaintiff must allege that some person has deprived him of a federal right. Second, he must allege that the person who has deprived him of that right acted under color of state or territorial law. See Monroe v. Pape, 365 U. S. 167, 171 (1961). Petitioner has made both of the required allegations. He alleged that his discharge by respondent violated his right to procedural due process, see Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U. S. 564 (1972), and that respondent acted under color of Puerto Rican law. See Monroe v. Pape, supra, at 172-187.7

Moreover, this Court has never indicated that qualified immunity is relevant to the existence of the plaintiff’s cause of action; instead we have described it as a defense available to the official in question. See Procunier v. Navarette, supra, at 562; Pierson v. Ray, supra, at 556, 557; Butz v. Economou, 438 U. S. 478, 508 (1978). Since qualified immunity is a defense, the burden of pleading it rests with the defendant. See Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 8 (c) (defendant must plead any “matter constituting an avoidance or affirmative defense”) ; 5 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1271 (1969). It is for the official to claim that his conduct was justified by an objectively reasonable belief that it was lawful. We see no basis for imposing on the plaintiff an obligation to anticipate such a defense by stating in his complaint that the defendant acted in bad faith.

Our conclusion as to the allocation of the burden of pleading is supported by the nature of the qualified immunity *641defense. As our decisions make clear, whether such immunity has been established depends on facts peculiarly within the knowledge and control of the defendant. Thus we have stated that “[i]t is the existence of reasonable grounds for the belief formed at the time and in light of all the circumstances, coupled with good-faith belief, that affords a basis for qualified immunity of executive officers for acts performed in the course of official conduct.” Scheuer v. Rhodes, supra, at 247-248. The applicable test focuses not only on whether the official has an objectively reasonable basis for that belief, but also on whether “[t]he official himself [is] acting sincerely and with a belief that he is doing right,” Wood v. Strickland, supra, at 321. There may be no way for a plaintiff to know in advance whether the official has such a belief or, indeed, whether he will even claim that he does. The existence of a subjective belief will frequently turn on factors which a plaintiff cannot reasonably be expected to know. For example, the official’s belief may be based on state or local law, advice of counsel, administrative practice, or some other factor of which the official alone is aware. To impose the pleading burden on the plaintiff would ignore this elementary fact and be contrary to the established practice in analogous areas of the law.8

*642The decision of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded to that court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Mr. Justice Rehnquist joins the opinion of the Court, reading it as he does to leave open the issue of the burden of persuasion, as opposed to the burden of pleading, with respect to a defense of qualified immunity.

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER

SUSAN WEBBER WRIGHT, District Judge.

Plaintiff Paula Corbin Jones seeks civil damages from the President of the United States for actions that, with one exception, are alleged to have occurred prior to his assuming office. The matter is before the Court on motion of the President for permission to file a motion to dismiss on grounds of Presidential immunity and to defer the filing of any other motions or pleadings until such time as the issue of immunity is resolved. The plaintiff has responded in opposition to the motion.1 For the reasons that follow, the Court finds that the President’s motion should be and hereby is granted.

*904I.

This complaint, which was filed on May 6, 1994, arises out of an alleged incident that is said to have occurred on May 8, 1991, when President Clinton was Governor of the State of Arkansas. The plaintiff was a state employee at the time, and she claims that the President sexually harassed and assaulted her during a conference being held at a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The plaintiff asserts four claims in her complaint against the President. In Counts I and II, she alleges that President Clinton conspired to and did deprive her of her constitutional rights to equal protection and due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. She contends that the President discriminated against her because of her gender by sexually harassing and assaulting her, by imposing a hostile work environment on her, and by causing her to fear that she would lose her job. She further claims that she was subjected arbitrarily to the fear of losing her job or experiencing other adverse actions in relation to her job and work environment. In Count III, plaintiff asserts a claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress or outrage, and claims in Count IV that the President, through his press aides and attorney, defamed her by denying the allegations that underlie this lawsuit.2

The President informs the Court that he will file a motion to dismiss the complaint without prejudice to its reinstatement after he leaves office, on grounds that sitting Presidents are constitutionally immune from having to litigate private suits for civil damages. He states that the immunity motion will raise serious issues which go to the constitutionality of compelling a sitting President to litigate private civil damages claims, as well as to this Court’s authority to proceed in this case in the first instance. The President argues the Court should allow him initially to assert the immunity issue alone, thereby permitting that question to be resolved prior to filing any other pleadings in the case.

II.

The President states that his immunity motion will be based substantially on the Supreme Court’s decision in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731, 102 S.Ct. 2690, 73 L.Ed.2d 349 (1982), a case decided on a narrow 5-4 margin. The plaintiff in that case, a former employee of the Department of the Air Force, had alleged that then-President Nixon abolished his position in retaliation for his testimony before a Congressional Committee. The District Court rejected President Nixon’s claim of immunity, and the Court of Appeals dismissed his collateral appeal. The Supreme Court granted certio-rari to decide the “important issue” of Presidential immunity. 457 U.S. 731, 741, 102 S.Ct. 2690, 2696. Referring to the plaintiffs claim as “this merely private suit for damages,” id. at 754, 102 S.Ct. at 2703, the Court held that “[i]n view of the special nature of the President’s constitutional office and functions, we think it appropriate to recognize absolute Presidential immunity from damages liability for acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.” Id. at 756, 102 S.Ct. at 2704. In so holding, the Court identified immunity as “a functionally mandated incident of the President’s unique office, rooted in the constitutional tradition of the separation of powers and supported by our history.” Id. at 749, 102 S.Ct. at 2701.

Fitzgerald involved official actions by a sitting President while the allegations here relate to conduct that purportedly occurred prior to President Clinton’s assumption of office. The President acknowledges this distinction and states that his motion will not assert absolute immunity such as was afforded in Fitzgerald, but will recognize the plaintiffs right to reinstate the lawsuit after he leaves office. In asserting such a claim of immunity, the President will seek entitlement to a fundamental protection from suit previously unrecognized in any court. This claim may or may not succeed. Nevertheless, because of the “singular importance of the President’s duties,” Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. at 751, 102 S.Ct. at 2702, and because suits for civil damages “frequently could distract a President from his public duties, to the detri-*905ment of not only the President and his office but also the Nation that the Presidency was designed to serve,” id. at 753, 102 S.Ct. at 2703, the Court concludes that the issue of Presidential immunity deserves threshold consideration, prior to the filing of any other motions or pleadings.

In allowing the President to first assert the issue of immunity, the Court is permitting a procedure that is entirely consistent with the principles underlying absolute immunity. The “essence of absolute immunity is its possessor’s entitlement not to have to answer for his [alleged] conduct in a civil damages action.” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 525, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 2815, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985) (citing Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731, 102 S.Ct. 2690). “The entitlement is an immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to liability,” and “it is effectively lost if a case is erroneously permitted to go to trial.” Id. at 526, 105 S.Ct. at 2816 (emphasis in original). See also Siegert v. Gilley, 500 U.S. 226, 232, 111 S.Ct. 1789, 1793, 114 L.Ed.2d 277 (1991) (noting that one of the purposes of immunity, absolute or qualified, is to spare a defendant not only unwarranted liability, but unwarranted demands customarily imposed upon those defending an extended lawsuit); Puerto Rico Aqueduct & Sewer Authority v. Metcalf & Eddy, Inc., — U.S. -, -, 113 S.Ct. 684, 687, 121 L.Ed.2d 605 (1993) (same). Because the entitlement is an immunity from suit, the Supreme Court has stressed that immunity questions should be resolved at the earliest possible stage in litigation. Hunter v. Bryant, 502 U.S. 224, -, 112 S.Ct. 534, 536, 116 L.Ed.2d 589 (1991).

Moreover, the immunity that will be asserted in this case is of a unique character and does not require an analysis of the allegations of the complaint. The Court thus has no need for dispositive motions at this time. Were the President asserting a defense of qualified immunity, the Court might well agree with the plaintiff that the substantive allegations of her complaint must be addressed. In such cases, courts are required to determine whether the alleged actions violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 2738, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). To decide whether an official is protected by qualified immunity, a court must determine whether the official’s action was objectively legally reasonable in the light of the legal rules that were clearly established at the time the action occurred. Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 639, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 3038-39, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987). This inquiry involves a two-step process. First, the court must determine as a threshold matter whether the plaintiff has alleged a violation of a constitutional right. Munz v. Michael, 28 F.3d 795, 799-800 (8th Cir.1994) (citing Beck v. Schwartz, 992 F.2d 870, 871 (8th Cir.1993) (per curiam)). See also Siegert, 500 U.S. at 232, 111 S.Ct. at 1793. Second, the court must determine whether that constitutional right was clearly established at the time that the officials acted. Munz, 28 F.3d at 799-800 (citing Cole v. Bone, 993 F.2d 1328, 1332 (8th Cir.1993)).

The immunity that will be asserted by the President, however, is premised on his status as President and does not require the Court to review the legal sufficiency of the complaint. Indeed, the allegations of the complaint are irrelevant. This Court “need not consider the correctness of the plaintiffs version of the facts, nor even determine whether the plaintiffs allegations actually state a claim. All it need determine is a question of law.” Forsyth, 472 U.S. at 528, 105 S.Ct. at 2827.3

Nevertheless, plaintiff argues that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require ev*906ery defendant, including the President of the United States, to either answer a complaint or file a single dispositive motion raising all available grounds for dismissal, including absolute immunity. Certainly, that is one way to handle a case, but it is not the only way it can be done. Plaintiff asserts, however, that the briefing schedule sought by the President is “nothing less than a categorical suspension of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.” To the contrary, Rule 12 specifically allows for successive motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim. Sharma v. Skaarup Ship Management Corp., 699 F.Supp. 440, 444 (S.D.N.Y.1988), aff'd, 916 F.2d 820 (2nd Cir.1990), cert. denied, 499 U.S. 907, 111 S.Ct. 1109, 113 L.Ed.2d 218 (1991). “Although defenses of lack of jurisdiction over the person, improper venue and insufficiency of process are waived if not raised in a party’s first responsive pleading, ‘A defense of failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted ... may be made in any pleading permitted or ordered under Rule 7(a), or by motion for judgment on the pleadings, or at the trial on the merits.’” Id. (citing Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(h)). See also 2A Moore’s Federal Practice ¶ 12.07[3] at 12-102 (2d ed. 1994) (affirmative defenses not enumerated in Rule 12(b) may be made by motion under Rule 12(b)(6)); 5A Charles A. Wright & Arthur R. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1361 at 447-48 (1990) (Rule 12(b)(6) motions are exempted by Rule 12(g) from the consolidation requirement). The briefing schedule sought by the President is in conformity with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and does not afford him privileges unavailable to other defendants.4

To be sure, the plaintiffs interest in seeking prompt relief for the alleged violation of her rights is certainly legitimate and not to be minimized. The Court, however, finds that plaintiffs concern that the briefing schedule proposed by the President will entail undue delay is unfounded. Should the Court deny the President’s claim of immunity, such order would be immediately appealable. Forsyth, 472 U.S. at 525, 105 S.Ct. at 2814-15; Puerto Rico Aqueduct & Sewer Authority, — U.S. at-, 113 S.Ct. at 687. This would be so regardless of the Court’s ruling on any other Rule 12(b) motions.

Furthermore, it must be recognized that the relief plaintiff seeks is of a purely personal nature, the delay of which will affect but a single individual who waited two days short of three years in which to file her lawsuit. The President’s claim to immunity from suits for civil damages, on the other hand, is equally legitimate and may affect “not only the President and his office but also the Nation that the Presidency was designed to serve.” Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. at 753, 102 S.Ct. at 2703.5 Indeed, the amenability of a sitting President to suits for civil damages raises significant and important constitutional issues, the resolution of which will directly impact the institution of the Presidency. That being so, and because the President’s constitutional responsibilities and status require this Court to exercise judicial deference and restraint, Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. at 753, 102 S.Ct. at 2703, the Court finds that the President should be allowed to defer the filing of any other motions or pleadings until such time as the issue of immunity has been resolved by this Court.

III.

For the foregoing reasons, the Court will allow the President to file a motion to dismiss on the grounds of Presidential immunity on or before August 10, 1994, and to defer *907and preserve the filing of any other motions or pleadings that may or must be filed under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure until such time as the issue of Presidential immunity has been resolved by this Court.6

IT IS SO ORDERED.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

SUSAN WEBBER WRIGHT, District Judge.

Paula Corbin Jones seeks civil damages from William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States, and Danny Ferguson, a former Arkansas State Police officer, for alleged actions beginning with an incident in a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. This case was previously before the Supreme Court of the United States to resolve the issue of Presidential immunity but has since been remanded to this Court following the Supreme Court’s determination that there is no constitutional impediment to allowing plaintiff’s ease to proceed while the President is in office. See Clinton v. Jones, — U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 1636, 137 L.Ed.2d 945 (1997).1 The matter is now before the Court on motion of the President for judgment on the pleadings and dismissal of the complaint pursuant to Rule 12(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The plaintiff has responded in oppo*716sition to the President’s motion, and the President has filed a reply to' plaintiff’s response. For the reasons that follow, the Court finds that the President’s motion for judgment on the pleadings and dismissal of the complaint should be and hereby is granted in part and denied in part.2

I.

This lawsuit is based on an incident that is said to have taken place on the afternoon of May 8,1991, in a suite at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Clinton was Governor of the State of Arkansas at the time and the plaintiff was a state employee with the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission (“AIDC”). Ferguson was an Arkansas State Police officer assigned to the Governor’s security detail.

According to the complaint, then-Governor Clinton was at the Excelsior Hotel on the day in question delivering a speech at an official conference being sponsored by the AIDC. Compl. ¶ 7. Plaintiff states that she and another AIDC employee, Pamela Blaekard, were working at a registration desk for the AIDC when a man approached the registration desk and informed her and Blackard that he was Trooper Danny Ferguson, the Governor’s bodyguard. Compl. ¶¶ 8-9. She states that Ferguson made small talk with her and Blackard and then left, but that he later reappeared at the registration desk, delivered a piece of paper to her with a four digit number written on it, and said that the Governor would like to meet with her in this suite number. Compl. ¶¶ 9-10. Thinking that it was an honor to be asked to meet the Governor and that it might lead to an enhanced employment opportunity, plaintiff states that she agreed to the meeting and that Ferguson escorted her to the floor of the hotel upon which the Governor’s suite was located. Compl. ¶¶ 11-13.

Plaintiff states that upon arriving at the suite and announcing herself, the Governor shook her hand, invited her in, and closed the door. Compl. ¶¶ 13-14, 16. She states that the suite was furnished not for overnight hotel guests but as a business suite, containing a couch and chairs, but no bed. Compl. ¶ 15. In any case, plaintiff states that a few minutes of small talk ensued, which included the Governor asking plaintiff about her job and him mentioning that Dave Harrington, plaintiffs ultimate superior within the AIDC and a Clinton appointee, was his “good friend.” Compl. ¶ 17. She states that the Governor then took her hand and “pulled her toward him, so that their bodies were in close proximity.” Compl. ¶ 18. Plaintiff states she removed her hand from his and retreated several feet, but that the Governor approached her again and, while saying, “I love the way your hair flows down your back” and “I love your curves,” put his hand on her leg, started sliding it toward the hem of her culottes, and bent down to attempt to Mss her on the neck. Compl. ¶¶ 19-20. She states that she walked away from the Governor and attempted to distract him by chatting about his wife, but that the Governor, after asMng her if she was married, approached the sofa where she had taken a seat and, as he sat down, “lowered his trousers and underwear exposing his erect penis and asked [her] to ‘Mss it.’ ” Compl. ¶ 21. Plaintiff states that she “became horrified” and stated to the Governor that she-was “not that Mnd of girl” and that she had to leave as she would get in trouble for being away from the registration desk. Compl. ¶23. She states that the Governor, “while fondling his penis,” said, “Well, I don’t want to make you do anytMng you don’t want to do,” and then pulled up his pants and said, “If you get in trouble for leaving work, have Dave call me immediately and I’ll take care of it.” Compl. ¶24. Plaintiff states that as she left the room, the Governor “looked sternly” at her and said, “You are smart. Let’s keep this between ourselves.” Compl. ¶ 24.

*717Plaintiff states that she would occasionally encounter Ferguson in the course of her employment with the AIDC following the alleged incident at the hotel. Compl. ¶¶ 35-37. She states that on one such occasion, Ferguson told her Mrs. Clinton was out of town often and that the Governor wants her phone number and wants to see her, and that on another occasion, Ferguson approached her and asked her how her fiancé, Steve, was doing, even though she had never told Ferguson or the Governor his name. Compl. ¶¶ 35-36. Plaintiff states that she again encountered Ferguson following her marriage and the birth of her child and that he said he had “told Bill how good looking you are since you’ve had the baby.” Compl. ¶37. She also states that she was “accosted” by the Governor in the Botunda of the Arkansas State Capitol when he “draped his arm over [her], pulled her close and tightly to his body,” and said to his bodyguard, Arkansas State Police officer Larry Patterson, “Don’t we make a beautiful couple — beauty and the beast?” Compl. ¶ 38.

Plaintiff continued to work at the AIDC following these alleged incidents but states that her enjoyment of her work was “severely diminished.” Compl. ¶ 39. She states she was treated in a “hostile and rude manner” by certain superiors in the AIDC and that this rude conduct had not happened prior to her encounter with the Governor. Compl. ¶39. Plaintiff states that she was later transferred to a position that had no responsible duties for which she could be adequately evaluated to earn advancement and that the reason given to her by her superiors for this transfer — that her previous position had been abolished — was untrue and was a pretext for the real reason which was that she was being punished for her rejection of the Governor’s various advances. Compl. ¶39. Plaintiff goes on to state that the job in which she was placed called for a higher grade and pay, but that she was not paid more money than she received in her previous position and never received a raise beyond a cost of living increase, even though other employees received merit increases. Compl. ¶ 39.

Plaintiff voluntarily terminated her employment with the AIDC on February 20, 1993, and moved to California with her husband and child shortly thereafter. Compl. ¶ 40. She states that in January 1994, while visiting family and friends in Arkansas, she was informed of a magazine article in The American Spectator regarding her alleged encounter with the Governor at the Excelsior Hotel. Compl. ¶41. Plaintiff states that this article, which she claims was based in part on an interview with Ferguson, falsely asserts that “a woman by the name of ‘Paula’ told an unnamed trooper (obviously Defendant Ferguson), who had escorted ‘Paula’ to Clinton’s hotel room, that ‘she was available to be Clinton’s regular girlfriend if he so desired,’ thus implying a consummated and satisfying sexual encounter with Clinton, as well as a willingness to continue a sexual relationship with him.” Compl. ¶42. She states that the article goes on to assert that other women “appear to have been willing participants” in alleged “affairs and liaisons” with President Clinton, and that since she was one of the women “preyed upon by Clinton and his troopers, including by Defendant Ferguson, in the manner described above, those who read this magazine account could conclude falsely that [she] (‘Paula’) had a sexual relationship and affair with Clinton.” Compl. ¶¶ 43-44.

On February 11, 1994, at an event attended by the media, plaintiff publically stated that she was the “Paula” mentioned in The American Spectator article, and that she had rebuffed the President’s sexual advances and had not expressed a willingness to be his girlfriend. Compl. ¶ 47. She states that she and her attorney asked the President to acknowledge this incident, to state that the plaintiff had rejected his advances, and to apologize to her, but that the President responded to her request for an apology by having his press spokespersons deliver a statement on his behalf that the incident never happened and that he never met plaintiff. Compl. ¶¶ 47-48. Plaintiff further states that the President, through his White House aides, stated that her account of the hotel room incident was untrue and a “cheap political trick,” and that Dee Dee Myers, then-White House Spokeswoman, said of *718plaintiffs allegations, “It’s just not true.” Compl. ¶¶ 48, 50. She goes on to state that the President hired an attorney who, as the President’s agent, said that her account “is really just another effort to rewrite the results of the election” and “distract the President from his agenda,” and who asked rhetorically, “Why are these claims being brought now, three years after the fact?” Compl. ¶49. She states he also asked how her allegations could be taken “seriously.” Compl. ¶ 49.

Plaintiff asserts four counts in her complaint against the President and Ferguson. Count I is a claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in which the plaintiff alleges that then-Govemor Clinton, acting under color of state law, deprived her of her constitutional rights to equal protection and due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution by sexually harassing and assaulting her. Compl. ¶¶ 58-65. Count II is a claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) in which the plaintiff alleges that Governor Clinton and Ferguson conspired to deprive her of her rights to equal protection of the laws and of equal privileges and immunities under the laws. Compl. ¶¶ 66-69.

Counts III and IV of the complaint are state law claims over which this Court has jurisdiction based on diversity of citizenship. In Count III, plaintiff asserts a claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress against the President, based primarily on the alleged incident at the hotel but also encompassing subsequent alleged acts. Compl. ¶¶ 70-74. In Count IV, plaintiff claims that the President, through his press aides and attorney, defamed her by denying the allegations that underlie this lawsuit and by questioning her motives, and that Ferguson defamed her by making certain comments to the press suggesting that she willingly participated in a sexual encounter. Compl. ¶¶ 75-79.

II.

The President moves for judgment on the pleadings and dismissal of the complaint pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(c) on the following grounds: (1) Count I fails to allege a deprivation of constitutional rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 premised on sexual harassment in the workplace because it fails to allege intent to deprive plaintiff of rights based on gender, actions taken under color of state law, quid pro quo harassment, a hostile work environment, or the deprivation of any constitutionally protected right; (2) Count II fails to allege a conspiracy to deprive constitutional rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) because it fails to allege intent to deprive plaintiff of equal protection based on gender and is based on what is at most an alleged violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VII”), 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e et seq., which the Supreme Court has expressly rejected as a basis for a § 1985(3) claim; (3) Count III is time-barred under the statute of limitations governing the alleged conduct and fails to allege the essential elements of a state law tort claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress; and (4) Count IV fails because it is founded on statements that are absolutely privileged, not actionable as a matter of law, and fails to allege defamation with the requisite specificity. The President argues that the plaintiff’s allegations fail to state a cognizable claim under any of the four counts and that the complaint should therefore be dismissed in its entirety.

A.

Under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(c), a motion for judgment on the pleadings may be brought after the pleadings are closed and is to be analyzed under the same standards that would have been employed had the motion been brought as a motion to dismiss under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6). St. Paul Ramsey County Med. Ctr. v. Pennington County, 857 F.2d 1185, 1187-88 (8th Cir.1988). See also Westcott v. City of Omaha, 901 F.2d 1486, 1488 (8th Cir.1990); James Wm. Moore et al., Moore’s Federal Practice ¶ 12.38 (3d ed.1997). In considering such a motion, all facts alleged in the complaint are assumed to be true. Doe v. Norwest Bank Minn., N.A., 107 F.3d 1297, 1303-04 (8th Cir.1997). The complaint should be reviewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, McMorrow v. Little, 109 F.3d 432, 434 (8th Cir.1997), and should not be dismissed unless it is clear beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no *719set of facts thereunder which would entitle him or her to relief. Hafley v. Lohman, 90 F.3d 264, 266 (8th Cir.1996), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 1081, 137 L.Ed.2d 216 (1997). A motion to dismiss is not a device for testing the truth of what is asserted or for determining whether the plaintiff has any evidence to back up what is in the complaint. ACLU Foundation of Southern California v. Barr, 952 F.2d 457, 467 (D.C.Cir.1991). The issue is not whether the plaintiff will ultimately prevail but whether the plaintiff is entitled to offer evidence to support the claims, irrespective of a judge’s disbelief of a complaint’s factual allegations or a judge’s belief that the plaintiff cannot prove what the complaint asserts. Id. See also Hickman v. Tosco Corp., 840 F.2d 564, 565 (8th Cir.1988); Fusco v. Xerox Corp., 676 F.2d 332, 334 (8th Cir.1982). Thus, a motion to dismiss should be granted “ ‘as a practical matter ... only in the unusual case in which a plaintiff includes allegations that show on the face of the complaint that there is some insuperable bar to relief.’ ” Frey v. City of Herculaneum, 44 F.3d 667, 671 (8th Cir.1995) (quoting Hishon v. King & Spalding, 467 U.S. 69, 73, 104 S.Ct. 2229, 2232, 81 L.Ed.2d 59 (1984)).

B.

1.

The Court first addresses the President’s argument that Count I fails to allege a deprivation of constitutional rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 premised on sexual harassment in the workplace. Section 1983 provides that “[ejvery person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State ... subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States ... to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in any action at law____” Therefore, in order to state an actionable claim under § 1983, a plaintiff must show that the conduct complained of has been committed under color of state law and that this conduct worked a denial of a right secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States. See, e.g., West v. Atkins, 487 U.S. 42, 48, 108 S.Ct. 2250, 2254, 101 L.Ed.2d 40 (1988); Martinez v. Colon, 54 F.3d 980, 984 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 116 S.Ct. 515, 133 L.Ed.2d 423 (1995); Lesher v. Reed, 12 F.3d 148, 150 (8th Cir.1994).

a.

The President argues that Count I fails to allege the basic elements of a civil rights claim — intent and action taken under color of state law. He argues that plaintiff has failed to allege facts showing that he acted against her with the intent to deprive her of constitutionally protected rights because of her membership in a protected class, and that plaintiff has alleged no nexus between the exercise of the Governor’s authority and the conduct she alleges and no control by the state over the alleged conduct. The Court has considered the matter and concludes that plaintiffs allegations are sufficient to state an actionable claim under § 1983.

i.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment confers a right to be free from gender discrimination that is not substantially related to important governmental objectives. Beardsley v. Webb, 30 F.3d 524, 529 (4th Cir.1994) (citing Davis v. Passman, 442 U.S. 228, 234-35, 99 S.Ct. 2264, 2271-72, 60 L.Ed.2d 846 (1979)). Applying this precept, courts have found that intentional sexual harassment of employees by persons acting under color of state law violates the Fourteenth Amendment and is actionable under § 1983. Id. (citing Pontarelli v. Stone, 930 F.2d 104, 113-14 (1st Cir.1991), and Bohen v. City of East Chicago, 799 F.2d 1180, 1185 (7th Cir.1986)). See also Southard v. Texas Bd. of Criminal Justice, 114 F.3d 539, 550 (5th Cir.1997); Whitney v. State of New Mexico, 113 F.3d 1170, 1174 (10th Cir.1997); Kern v. City of Rochester, 93 F.3d 38, 43 (2nd Cir.1996), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 1335, 137 L.Ed.2d 494 (1997). A plaintiff wishing to sustain an equal protection claim of sexual harassment under the Fourteenth Amendment must show both “sexual harassment” and an “intent” to harass based upon that plaintiffs membership in a particular class of citizens — i.e., male or female. Trautvetter v. Quick, 916 F.2d 1140, 1149-50 (7th Cir.1990). While an individual plaintiff *720may pursue a sexual harassment claim under the Fourteenth Amendment based solely upon acts of harassment directed towards her, such a claim must show an intent to harass because of her status as a female and not because of characteristics of her gender which are personal to her. Id. at 1151. See also Bohen, 799 F.2d at 1187; Stafford v. State of Missouri, 835 F.Supp. 1136, 1141 (W.D.Mo.1993).

In this case, the nature of plaintiff’s allegations are such that it can be fairly said that the alleged actions were based on plaintiff’s status as a female. Among other things, plaintiff alleges that then-Governor Clinton expressed an admiration for her “curves,” attempted to kiss her in the hotel room and pulled her towards him, placed his hand on her leg and slid it toward the hem of her culottes, exposed his penis and requested that she “kiss it,” hugged her in the Rotunda of the Capitol and described them as a couple, and directed a state trooper to inform her that the Governor’s wife was out of town often and that the Governor would like to see her. She notes that the Governor had never met her prior to the incident in the hotel suite and that all he knew about her was, in her words, “that she was a state employee and a woman — a woman with flowing hair and nice ‘curves.’ ” Accepting plaintiff’s allegations to be true, as is required at this stage of the proceedings, it can reasonably be argued that the Governor’s alleged acts were “not consistent with platonic love” but were “based on her gender and motivated by his libido.” King v. Board of Regents of the Univ. of Wis. Sys., 898 F.2d 533, 539 (7th Cir.1989).

This is not to say that the Governor’s alleged actions would not also support a finding that such actions were because of characteristics personal to plaintiff. Indeed, the line between harassment because of gender and harassment based on factors personal to a plaintiff “becomes indistinct when those factors which are personal to an individual include attributes of sexual attraction.” Trautvetter, 916 F.2d at 1151. Nevertheless, plaintiff claims that his alleged acts were “because of her gender,” and “sexual behavior directed at a woman raises the inference that the harassment is based on her sex.” Burns v. McGregor Elec. Indus., Inc., 955 F.2d 559, 564 (8th Cir.1992). See also King, 898 F.2d at 539 (determining that treatment of an individual based on sexual desire is sexually motivated; sexual desire does not negate intent, it affirmatively establishes it). While it remains to be seen whether plaintiff’s allegations will survive a motion for summary judgment and, if so, whether she can prove these allegations at trial, the Court finds that plaintiff has sufficiently alleged that the Governor’s actions were based on an intent to harass because of her status as a woman as opposed to mere characteristics which were personal to her.3

ii.

The Court also finds that plaintiff has alleged actions that were under color of state law. “The traditional definition of acting under color of state law requires that the defendant in a § 1983 action have exercised power ‘possessed by virtue of state law and made possible only because the wrongdoer is clothed with the authority of state law.’” West, 487 U.S. at 49, 108 S.Ct. at 2255 (quoting United States v. Classic, 313 U.S. 299, 326, 61 S.Ct. 1031, 1043, 85 L.Ed. 1368 (1941)). See also Parker v. Boyer, 93 F.3d 445, 447-48 (8th Cir.1996), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 1081, 137 L.Ed.2d 216 (1997). “[Ujnder color of law means under ‘pretense’ of law.” Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 111, 65 S.Ct. 1031, 1039, 89 L.Ed. 1495 (1945) (plurality opinion). A person thus acts under color of state law “when he abuses the position given to him by the State.’ ” Martinez, 54 F.3d at 986 (quoting West, 487 U.S. at 50, 108 S.Ct. at 2256). See also Parrilla-Burgos v. Hernandez-Rivera, 108 F.3d 445, 449 (1st Cir.1997) (noting that *721an act occurs under pretense of law when an individual imbued with official authority purports to exercise that authority when actually acting wholly outside of it).

The President argues that plaintiff at best complains of purely personal conduct by an individual who was also the Governor of Arkansas and that the conduct alleged in this ease was nothing more than a single overture that was abandoned as soon as plaintiff stated it was unwelcome. He argues that the plaintiff has alleged i no nexus between the exercise of the Governor’s authority and the conduct which she alleges and that plaintiff has alleged no control by the state over the alleged conduct. Therefore, the President argues, it cannot be said that the alleged conduct of which plaintiff complains occurred under color of state law.

It is, of course, true that not every action undertaken by a person who happens to be employed by the state is thereby “under color of state law.” See, e.g., Mark v. Borough of Hatboro, 51 F.3d 1137, 1150 (3rd Cir.) (explaining that an otherwise private tort is not committed under color of state law simply because the tortfeasor is an employee of the state), cert. denied, - U.S.-, 116 S.Ct. 165, 133 L.Ed.2d 107 (1995); Kern, 93 F.3d at 43 (“[m]ere employment by a state or municipality does not automatically mean that a defendant’s actions are taken under the color of state law”). Indeed, “the construct — ‘acting under color of state law’— rarely depends on any single, easily determinable fact,” such as employment status, but requires an examination of all the relevant circumstances. Martinez, 54 F.3d at 986. Thus, while a defendant’s governmental status is certainly relevant in determining whether the defendant’s actions were under color of state law, there is nevertheless no § 1983 liability if the challenged conduct is not related in some meaningful way either to the defendant’s governmental status or to the performance of his or her duties. Id. at 986-87. See also Barna v. City of Perth Amboy, 42 F.3d 809, 816 (3rd Cir.1994) (noting that a police officer’s purely private acts which are not furthered by any actual or purported state authority are not acts under color of state law); Borough of Hatboro, 51 F.3d at 1151 (noting that “if a person’s actions “were not committed in the performance of any actual or pretended duty,’ the actions were not committed under color of law”). The question for this Court, then, is whether the conduct which plaintiff alleges can be said to have been related in some meaningful way to the President’s status as Governor of Arkansas or to the performance of his duties. The Court answers this question in the affirmative.

Plaintiff alleges that Governor Clinton was at the hotel on official business and that he used his position and authority as Governor to facilitate his alleged sexual harassment of her. She alleges that he summoned her to his hotel suite by a police officer who was serving as his bodyguard and who stated that the Governor would like to meet with her; that in the suite, the Governor made inquiries about her job and indicated that he had influence over her ultimate superior within the AIDC; that he then made “repugnant” and “abhorrent” sexual advances towards her and “held [her] against her will by the oppressive atmosphere of intimidation caused by the presence of the highest official of the State of Arkansas and an armed guard at the door”; that after she rejected his alleged advances, he reminded her of his influence with her superior and, in effect, instructed her to keep quiet; and that her rejection of his alleged sexual advances caused her to suffer adverse employment actions, including being transferred to a position that had no responsible duties for which she could be adequately evaluated to earn advancement and failing to receive raises and merit increases.

There can be no doubt that plaintiffs allegations describe conduct that was under col- or of state law. Although, as previously noted, it remains to be seen whether plaintiff will be able to sustain these allegations, she has sufficiently alleged that the President exercised power possessed by virtue of his being Governor of the State of Arkansas in committing the alleged acts and that she only came into contact with him due to his authority as Governor. Plaintiffs allegations thus satisfy § 1983’s color of law requirement. Cf. Dang Vang v. Vang Xiong X. Toyed 944 F.2d 476 (9th Cir.1991) (concluding that a *722state employee, who was employed to find refugees suitable employment, acted under color of state law where he used his government position to exert influence and physical control over refugees in order to sexually harass them); David v. City and County of Denver, 101 F.3d 1344, 1354 (10th Cir.1996) (applying § 1983’s color of law requirement to allegations of sexual harassment based on alleged incidents that occurred when off-duty police officers who were working as security guards allegedly harassed a fellow female officer and concluding that the female officer might be able to recover if she could establish that, in committing alleged harassment, fellow officers had supervisory authority over her or in some other way exercised state authority over her), petition for cert. filed, 66 U.S.L.W. 3085 (June 30, 1997) (No. 97-18); Haberthur v. City of Raymore, Mo., 119 F.3d 720 (8th Cir.1997) (concluding that the plaintiff raised a colorable claim that an officer’s sexual assault of her was “entwined with an abuse of his police authority” and under color of state law where the officer used a police cruiser to follow her home, threatened her with tickets on two occasions, and was on duty and in uniform).

b.

The President also argues that Count I fails to set forth the essential elements of a § 1983 sexual harassment claim. As a general matter, a claim of sexual harassment under § 1983 must satisfy the contours of a sexual harassment claim under Title VII. Trautvetter, 916 F.2d at 1149; Beardsley, 30 F.3d at 529. In this regard, courts have generally separated sexual harassment claims into two categories- — quid pro quo eases and hostile environment cases. Kinman v. Omaha Pub. Sch. Dist., 94 F.3d 463, 467 (8th Cir.1996). The Court finds that Count I sufficiently alleges both categories of sexual harassment.

i.

To make a prima facie case of quid pro quo sexual harassment, a plaintiff must show that (1) she was a member of a protected class; (2) she was subjected to unwelcome sexual harassment in the form of sexual advances or requests for sexual favors; (3) the harassment was based on sex; and (4) her submission to the unwelcome advances was an express or implied condition for receiving job benefits or her refusal to submit resulted in a tangible job detriment. Cram v. Lamson & Sessions Co., 49 F.3d 466, 473 (8th Cir.1995) (citing Kauffman v. Allied Signal, Inc., 970 F.2d 178, 186 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 506 U.S. 1041, 113 S.Ct. 831, 121 L.Ed.2d 701 (1992)).

The Court finds that plaintiff has satisfied the first three factors as she is a member of a protected class, see Quick v. Donaldson Co., 90 F.3d 1372, 1377 (8th Cir.1996) (determining that the requirement of membership in a protected group is satisfied by showing that the plaintiff employee is a man or a woman), she sufficiently alleges she was subjected to unwelcome sexual harassment in the form of sexual advances or requests for sexual favors, see id. (determining that the type of conduct that may constitute sexual harassment includes sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature), and the alleged harassment can be said to have been based on her sex. See Robinson v. City of Pittsburgh, 120 F.3d 1286, 1296 (3rd Cir.1997) (determining that for purposes of establishing a quid pro quo violation, discrimination because of sex occurs when an employee’s compensation, etc., is dependent upon submission to unwelcome sexual advances).

The primary focus of the President’s argument for dismissal of plaintiffs claim of quid pro quo sexual harassment is directed to the fourth factor. He argues that this claim is fatally flawed because she fails to allege either a benefit offered to her or a threat made against her, fails to allege that she suffered any sort of tangible job detriment as a result of his alleged advance, and fails to allege that the Governor — who was not her immediate supervisor — communicated with her employer and thereby caused any adverse job consequences which she allegedly suffered.

The Court has previously set forth plaintiff’s allegations regarding how then-Governor Clinton indicated that he had influence over her ultimate superior within the AIDC, *723how he, in effect, reminded her of his influence with her superior after she rejected his alleged sexual advances by instructing her to keep quiet, and how her rejection of the Governor’s alleged advances caused her to suffer adverse employment actions, including being transferred to a position that had no responsible duties for which she could be adequately evaluated to earn advancement and failing to receive raises and merit increases. Contrary to the President’s assertions, then, plaintiff has alleged that there was a threat, has alleged that she suffered a tangible job detriment, and has alleged that there was a causal relationship between her rejection of the Governor’s alleged sexual advances and the harm she allegedly suffered.4 Whatever may become of these allegations, they suffice at this time to state a prima facie case of quid pro quo sexual harassment. See Chamberlin v. 101 Realty, Inc. 915 F.2d 777, 783 (1st Cir.1990) (concluding that it is the essence of quid pro quo harassment when an employee is subjected to unwelcome sexual advances by a supervisor and her reaction, to these advances affects tangible aspects of her compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment).

ü.

The Court also finds that plaintiff has sufficiently alleged a hostile work environment cause of action. Unlike quid pro quo sexual harassment, hostile work environment harassment arises when “sexual conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.” Cram, 49 F.3d at 474 (quoting Hall v. Gus Constr. Co., 842 F.2d 1010, 1013 (8th Cir.1988)). To prevail on a hostile environment cause of action, a plaintiff must establish that (1) she belongs to a protected group; (2) she was subjected to unwelcome sexual harassment; (3) the harassment was based on sex; (4) the harassment affected a term;, condition or privilege of employment; and (5) her employer knew or should have known of the harassment and failed to take proper remedial action. Callanan v. Runyun, 75 F.3d 1293, 1296 (8th Cir.1996). See also Smith v. St. Louis Univ., 109 F.3d 1261, 1264 (8th Cir. 1997); Quick, 90 F.3d at 1377. The behavior creating the hostile working environment need not be overtly sexual in nature, but it must be “ ‘unwelcome’ in the sense that the employee did not solicit or invite it, and the employee regarded the conduct as undesirable or offensive.” Cram, 49 F.3d at 474 (quoting Hall, 842 F.2d at 1014). The harassment must also be sufficiently severe or pervasive “to alter the conditions of employment and create an abusive working environment.” Id. (quoting Meritor Sav. Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57, 67, 106 S.Ct. 2399, 2405, 91 L.Ed.2d 49 (1986)). See also Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc., 510 U.S. 17, 21, 114 S.Ct. 367, 370, 126 L.Ed.2d 295 (1993).

As was the case with plaintiffs claim of quid pro quo sexual harassment, the Court finds that plaintiff is a member of a protected class, that she sufficiently alleges she was subjected to unwelcome sexual harassment, and that the alleged harassment of which she complains can be said to have been based on her sex. See Quick, 90 F.3d at 1377. In addition, to the extent there is a dispute as to whether plaintiff has sufficiently alleged that her employer knew or should have known of the alleged harassment and failed to take remedial action, the Court finds that plaintiff’s allegations aré sufficient to satisfy this requirement as well.5

The President’s primary argument for dismissal of plaintiff’s hostile work environment claim is that aside from the supposed single incident at the Excelsior Hotel, *724the complaint alleges only one other contact with him, alleges only a few additional contacts with Ferguson, and contains conclusory claims that plaintiff’s supervisors were rude. He argues that taken individually or as a whole, these contacts do not in any way constitute the kind of pervasive, intimidating, abusive conduct that courts require to establish a hostile work environment claim.

In assessing the hostility of an environment, a court must look to the totality of the circumstances. Stacks v. Southwestern Bell Yellow Pages, 27 F.3d 1316, 1327 (8th Cir.1994). Circumstances to be considered include “the frequency of the discriminatory conduct; its severity; whether it is physically threatening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; and whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance.” Harris, 510 U.S. at 23, 114 S.Ct. at 367. No single factor is determinative, see id., and the court “should not carve the work environment into a series of discrete incidents and then measure the harm occurring in each episode.” Burns, 955 F.2d at 564. Even a single incident of sexual harassment can in some circumstances suffice to state a claim of hostile work environment sexual harassment. See, e.g., Torres v. Pisano, 116 F.3d 625, 631 n. 4 (2nd Cir.1997).

The Court finds that the totality of the actions alleged in this case are such that they can be said to have altered the conditions of plaintiff’s employment and created an abusive work environment. In addition to what is alleged to have occurred in the hotel suite, plaintiff alleges that she was subjected to additional encounters with Ferguson and the Governor, including being “accosted” in the Rotunda of the State Capitol. She claims that following her rejection of the Governor’s alleged sexual advances, her enjoyment of her work was “severely diminished,” she was treated in a hostile and rude manner by supervisors, and, as previously noted, her rejection of the Governor’s alleged advances caused her to suffer adverse employment actions, including being transferred to a position that had no responsible duties for which she could be adequately evaluated to earn advancement and failing to receive raises and merit increases. She further claims that these alleged actions and omissions caused her, among other things, embarrassment, humiliation, fear, emotional distress, horror, grief, and shame. Although the President’s argument regarding the inadequacy of plaintiff’s hostile work environment claim is not without some force, the question of whether alleged harassment is sufficiently severe or pervasive for purposes of establishing hostile work environment is “quintessentially a question of fact,” see Beardsley, 30 F.3d at 530 (citation omitted), and one the Court simply cannot resolve on this record. Plaintiff’s allegations as they now stand state a hostile work environment claim. See Quick, 90 F.3d at 1378 (noting that a discriminatorily abusive work environment may exist where the harassment caused economic injury, affected the employee’s psychological well-being, detracted from job performance, discouraged an employee from remaining on the job, or kept the employee from advancing in her career).

c.

For his final argument under Count I, the President argues that plaintiff fails to state an' actionable due process claim as she has failed to allege a cognizable property loss, failed to allege deprivation of a protected liberty interest in reputation, and failed to allege a deprivation of a protected liberty interest arising from alleged false imprisonment. The Court agrees in all respects.

i.

The Court first addresses plaintiff’s claim that she was deprived of the substantive due process right to bodily integrity. The President argues that this claim was raised for the first time in her response to his motion for judgment on the pleadings and is therefore not properly before the Court. It is not necessary for the Court to resolve that question, however, as the Court finds that plaintiff’s allegations do not support such a claim.

In Haberthur v. City of Raymore, Mo., 119 F.3d 720, 723 (8th Cir.1997), the Eighth Circuit concluded that a person’s substantive due process right to bodily integrity or privacy may be violated by “sexual fondling and touching or other egregious sexual contact.” Haberthur involved a situation in which the *725alleged perpetrator, a police officer who had used the City’s police cruiser to follow plaintiff home and threaten her with tickets on two occasions, “reached his hand underneath [the plaintiffs] shirt and fondled a private erogenous area and moved his hands along and caressed her body while making sexually suggestive remarks.” Id. at 724. The court noted that this conduct “was intrusive, demeaning, and violative of her personal integrity,” and that “[t]he implication for farther sexual contact was in the larger context of threatening adverse official action by way of a ticket and following her in his police car.” Id. In recognizing that such a sexual assault can be a constitutional violation under § 1983, the court relied on decisions of other courts of appeal that have addressed this type of constitutional injury. See Lillard v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ., 76 F.3d 716, 727 (6th Cir.1996) (concluding that a teacher’s fondling a student’s breast may violate the substantive due process right to bodily integrity); McWilliams v. Fairfax County Bd. of Supervisors, 72 F.3d 1191, 1197 (4th Cir.) (determining that the substantive due process right against unreasonable bodily intrusions was violated when an employee was forced to his knees, a finger was inserted in his mouth, and a broomstick placed next to his clothed buttocks, and he was sexually fondled), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 72, 136 L.Ed.2d 32 (1996); Sepulveda v. Ramirez, 967 F.2d 1413, 1415-16 (9th Cir.1992) (concluding that a parole officer was not entitled to qualified immunity for depriving a woman of her clearly established due process right to bodily privacy by entering a bathroom stall and watching her urinate), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 931, 114 S.Ct. 342, 126 L.Ed.2d 307 (1993).

The Eighth Circuit’s decision in Haberthur establishes that an actionable claim for the substantive due process right to bodily integrity requires that there be some type of “sexual fondling and touching or other egregious sexual contact.” But no such conduct is alleged here. The conduct that plaintiff does allege in support of this claim — that the Governor asked plaintiff to go to a place where sex would be possible, that he exposed himself, and that he possessed ongoing authority over her — may in conjunction with additional alleged conduct suffice to state other claims under state and federal law, and indeed the Court today so finds, but it does not rise to the level necessary to state a claim for violation of the substantive due process right to bodily integrity or privacy. Plaintiff simply has not alleged conduct that could be characterized as “egregious sexual contact” nor has she alleged any other type of “egregious” conduct, such as that present in Sepulveda where the victim was forced to expose herself. Accordingly, this claim would be dismissed regardless of whether it was properly before the Court. Cf. Reeve v. Oliver, 41 F.3d 381 (8th Cir.1994) (determining that a woman’s claim that a police officer responding to her complaint about barking dogs had twice rubbed her back and stared at her chest failed to state an actionable substantive due process violation) (per curiam).

ii.

The Court also rejects plaintiffs claim that she suffered a denial of her property interest in her state job. Protected property interests are created by state law. Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 577, 92 S.Ct. 2701, 2709, 33 L.Ed.2d 548 (1972); Cleveland Bd. of Educ. v. Loudermill, 470 U.S. 532, 538, 105 S.Ct. 1487, 1491, 84 L.Ed.2d 494 (1985). Such interests typically arise from contractual, regulatory, or statutory provisions which constrain the employer from taking certain actions or which confer a benefit. See, e.g., Winegar v. Des Moines Indep. Community Sch. Dist., 20 F.3d 895, 899 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, 513 U.S. 964, 115 S.Ct. 426, 130 L.Ed.2d 340 (1994); Blankenbaker v. McCook Pub. Power Dist., 940 F.2d 384, 385 (8th Cir.1991); Mangan v. Cullen, 870 F.2d 1396, 1400 (8th Cir.1989). When a protected property interest exists, the employee is entitled to a hearing or some related form of due process before being deprived of the interest. Winegar, 20 F.3d at 899 (citing Loudermill, 470 U.S. at 542, 105 S.Ct. at 1493).

Plaintiffs claim that she suffered a property loss is premised on her assertion that she feared for the loss of her job as a result of the Governor’s alleged actions. She claims she “was entitled to due process protection of *726freedom from arbitrary action which jeopardized her property interest in her public employee job in that she should not have been subjected arbitrarily to the fear of losing that job or of having to provide sex to the Governor as a quid pro quo for keeping the job.” She goes on to claim that “she should not have been subjected arbitrarily to the fear of losing the enjoyment of a proper and pleasant work environment, or to other adverse actions which she feared and which deprived her of the proper enjoyment and efficiency of her work.” But even assuming plaintiff’s fear of job loss was justified (which it may well have been if the allegations of her complaint are true), and even if her fear of other adverse actions deprived her of “the proper enjoyment and efficiency of her work,” it is undisputed that plaintiff was never deprived of her employment with the AIDC but instead voluntarily quit her job in order to move to California. Plaintiff has cited no authority, state or federal, for the proposition that fear of job loss without any actual deprivation gives rise to a protected property interest.

Moreover, even if plaintiff had alleged that she actually lost her job, she would not be entitled to relief as an employee in Arkansas generally does not have a constitutionally protected interest in his or her employment. See, e.g., Black v. Barnett, 999 F.2d 1295, 1296 (8th Cir.1993) (determining that a state employee generally has no property interest, in a state job) (per curiam); Drake v. Scott, 823 F.2d 239, 242 (8th Cir.) (concluding that no property interest exists in state employment absent an express provision that discharge will not be without cause), cert. denied 484 U.S. 965, 108 S.Ct. 455, 98 L.Ed.2d 395 (1987). Plaintiff has not identified any statute, contract, document, or other authority that would remove her case from within the purview of this general rule.

To the extent plaintiff is asserting she was deprived of a protected property interest in certain job benefits, such as a particular job assignment within the AIDC or an opportunity for promotions and pay raises, this claim too is without merit.6 In order to have a property interest in a benefit, a plaintiff “must have more than an abstract need or desire for it. He must have more than a unilateral expectation of it. He must, instead, have a legitimate claim of entitlement to it.” Roth, 408 U.S. at 577, 92 S.Ct. at 2709. Plaintiff has pointed to nothing in Arkansas law that entitles her, in a constitutional sense, to a particular job assignment within the AIDC, and she has not identified any contract or other document that would give her entitlement to a promotion or pay raise.

Plaintiff does direct this Court’s attention to two statutes, Ark.Code Ann. §§ 21-5-209 and 21-5-211, which she states supports her claim. The Court has examined these statutes and can find nothing in their provisions that would give rise to a protected property interest in promotions or pay raises. Ark. Code Ann. § 21-5-209 merely establishes a compensation plan for state agencies and institutions for the setting of salaries and salary increases where such increases are “deserved.” Indeed, this statute specifically provides that “it is not the intent [of the General Assembly] that any pay increases shall be automatic or that any employee shall have a claim or right thereto unless the department head of the agency or the institution shall determine that the employee, by experience, ability, and work performance, has earned the increase in pay authorized for the appropriate rate.” Ark.Code Ann. § 21-5-209(c). Similarly, Ark.Code Ann. § 21-5-211 merely establishes an implementation procedure for grade changes and does not grant any entitlement to a salary increase. In fact, the statute repeatedly refers to an employee’s “eligibility” for salary adjustments and merit increases based upon “satisfactory” performance ratings. Such language can hardly be construed as creating an entitlement in any benefits of the type that plaintiff here claims.

It is of no import that these statutes may establish a range within which an employee’s salary must fall as such a requirement does *727not give rise to a protected property interest in a salary increase. See Mangan, 870 F.2d at 1400 (determining that there can be no legitimate claim of entitlement to a salary increase where the only restriction placed on discretion in setting the salary is that the salary fall within a certain prescribed range). Although plaintiff may not have been paid more money after her transfer than she received in her previous position, she does not dispute that her salary at all times fell within the prescribed range. That being so, and because plaintiff has not identified any other source of state law that would entitle her to a particular job assignment or an opportunity for promotions and pay raises, plaintiffs claim that she was deprived of a property interest in such benefits must be rejected.7 Cf. Lowe v. Kansas City, Mo. Bd. of Police Comm’rs, 841 F.2d 857, 858 (8th Cir.1988) (affirming the dismissal of a complaint for failure to state a claim and rejecting a claim of deprivation of property interest in wages, benefits, and loss of opportunities for transfers and/or promotions where the plaintiffs salary had not been diminished and “[a]ny loss in status or wages claimed by [plaintiff was] purely speculative”).

iii.

The Court also concludes that plaintiff has failed to allege deprivation of a protected liberty interest in reputation. It is true that the Supreme Court has recognized a protected due process liberty interest in reputation where an employee’s “good name, reputation, honor, or integrity is at stake because of what the government is doing to him.” Mascho v. Gee, 24 F.3d 1037, 1039 (8th Cir.1994) (quoting Roth, 408 U.S. at 573, 92 S.Ct. at 2707). To prevail on such a claim, however, a plaintiff “must show defamation by a state official, and that the defamation occurred in the course of the termination of employment.” Id. (citing Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S. 693, 710, 96 S.Ct. 1155, 1164, 47 L.Ed.2d 405 (1976)). For purposes of a due process claim, defamation occurs when a state official publieally makes allegedly untrue charges against the employee that would stigmatize her so as to seriously damage her standing and associations in her community and foreclose her freedom to take advantage of other employment opportunities. Id. (citing Shands v. City of Kennett, 993 F.2d 1337, 1347 (8th Cir.1993), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 1072, 114 S.Ct. 880, 127 L.Ed.2d 75 (1994)). See also Johnson v. City of West Memphis, 113 F.3d 842, 843 (8th Cir.1997) (determining that an employee’s liberty interests are implicated when, in connection with the employee’s discharge, a government official makes accusations that seriously damage the employee’s standing in the community or foreclose other employment opportunities); Waddell v. Forney, 108 F.3d 889, 895 (8th Cir.1997) (same).

Plaintiff’s claim for deprivation of a protected liberty interest in reputation is based on Governor Clinton’s alleged statement that he and the plaintiff made “a beautiful couple” and on certain as yet unidentified statements that she states she “expects” to prove the Governor published to others regarding her actions in the hotel suite on May 8, 1991. Even assuming such statements were made, however, it is undisputed that these statements did not occur in the course of any termination of plaintiff, and it has not been alleged, nor can it be inferred from the allegations of the complaint, that such statements foreclosed any employment opportunities for plaintiff. Indeed; as previously noted, plaintiff voluntarily quit her job in order to move to California. That being the case, and because “it is well established that defamation or injury to reputation by itself does not state a constitutional deprivation,” Brayman v. United States, 96 F.3d 1061, 1066 (8th Cir.1996), plaintiff has not stated an actionable claim for deprivation of a due process liberty interest in her reputation,

iv.

Finally, the Court finds that plaintiff does not state a claim for deprivation of a protected • liberty interest arising from alleged false imprisonment. Plaintiff’s claim on this point, which she characterizes as “clear notice of a valid claim of false impris*728onment under color of state law,” is based on her assertion that she was lured to the hotel suite on the day in question for different purposes than she was led to believe and was held there “against her will by the oppressive atmosphere of intimidation caused by the presence of the highest official of the State of Arkansas and an armed guard at the door.” However, as noted in Gregory v. City of Rogers, 974 F.2d 1006, 1009 (8th Cir.1992), cert. denied, 507 U.S. 913, 113 S.Ct. 1265, 122 L.Ed.2d 661 (1993), “[m]any harms, though caused by a state actor, do not fall within the scope of section 1983, for section 1983 does not turn the Fourteenth Amendment into a font of tort law that supercedes the tort systems already available under individual state laws.” In this regard, the Supreme Court, in Baker v. McCollan, 443 U.S. 137, 99 S.Ct. 2689, 61 L.Ed.2d 433 (1979), held that § 1983 does not provide a remedy for false imprisonment, stating as follows:

Section 1983 imposes liability for violations of rights protected by the Constitution, not for violations of duties of care arising out of tort law. Remedy for the latter type of injury must be sought in state court under traditional tort-law principles. Just as “[mjedical malpractice does not become a constitutional violation merely because the victim is a prisoner,” false imprisonment does not become a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment merely because the defendant is a state official.

443 U.S. at 146, 99 S.Ct. at 2695-96 (citation omitted).

With the Supreme Court’s decision in Baker, “the law is now sufficiently clear that careful lawyering should divert the ordinary false arrest and false imprisonment cases to the state courts where they belong.” Edwards v. Baer, 863 F.2d 606, 607 (8th Cir.1988). Plaintiffs claim falls within this category.

Although plaintiff states that “this is hardly an ordinary ease of false imprisonment,” the President argues, and this Court agrees, that plaintiff’s claim would not suffice to survive a motion to dismiss under state law. Her own complaint alleges that she voluntarily and willingly went to the hotel suite, that the Governor told her, “I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do,” and that she then simply walked out of the hotel suite. Plaintiffs allegations plainly do not demonstrate the type of “detention” required under state law, see Grandjean v. Grandjean, 315 Ark. 620, 869 S.W.2d 709, 711 (1994) (defining false imprisonment as the “unlawful violation of the personal liberty of another, consisting of detention without sufficient legal authority”), nor is there any allegation that plaintiff was threatened with- physical restraint or otherwise required to stay against her will. The Court therefore grants the President’s motion for dismissal with respect to plaintiffs claim for false imprisonment.

2.

The Court next addresses the President’s argument that Count II fails to state an actionable § 1985(3) claim. In order to prove the existence of a civil rights conspiracy under § 1985(3), a plaintiff must prove that: (1) the defendants did conspire; (2) such conspiracy was for the purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly, any person or class of persons of equal protection of the laws, or equal privileges and immunities under the laws; (3) one or more of the conspirators did, or caused to be done, any act in furtherance of the object of the conspiracy; and (4) another person was injured in his person or property or deprived of having , and exercising any right or privilege of a citizen in the United States. Larson v. Miller, 76 F.3d 1446, 1454 (8th Cir.1996) (en banc). See also Andrews v. Fowler, 98 F.3d 1069, 1079 (8th Cir.1996). The President argues that Count II fails to allege intent to deprive plaintiff of equal protection based on gender and is based on what is at most an alleged violation of Title VII. The Court disagrees with both of these arguments.

a.

The “purpose” element of a conspiracy claim under § 1985(3) requires that the plaintiff prove a class-based “invidiously discriminatory animus.” Larson, 76 F.3d at 1454 (quoting City of Omaha Employees Betterment Ass’n v. City of Omaha, 883 F.2d 650, 652 (8th Cir.1989)). “Moreover, the plaintiff must allege with particularity and *729specifically démonstrate with material facts that the defendants reached an agreement.” Id. The plaintiff can satisfy this burden by pointing to at least some facts which would suggest that the defendants “reached an understanding” to violate her rights. Id. See also Andrews, 98 F.3d at 1079-80 (determining that the plaintiff must demonstrate discriminatory purpose by showing that the defendants selected the particular course of action because of and not merely in spite of its adverse effects upon an identifiable group).

Plaintiff has satisfied the intent requirement of § 1985(3) in this case as women are a protected class falling within the ambit of the protections afforded by § 1985(3), see Libertad v. Welch, 53 F.3d 428, 449 (1st Cir.1995), and the Court has already determined that plaintiff sufficiently alleges that the Governor’s alleged actions were based on an intent to harass because of her status as a woman as opposed to mere characteristics which were personal to her. As plaintiff has also alleged at least some facts which would suggest that the defendants “reached an understanding” to violate her equal protection rights, the Court finds that plaintiff states an actionable § 1985(3) claim.

b.

The Court also finds that Count II alleges more than a mere violation of Title VII. The President argues that absent any alleged facts to support a finding that the defendants acted with the intent to deprive plaintiff of her civil rights, her complaint alleges at most a violation of Title VII, which prohibits sex discrimination and sexual harassment in employment. While it is true that the Supreme Court has expressly held that § 1985(3) may not be invoked to redress violations of Title VII, see Great Am. Fed. Sav. & Loan Ass’n v. Novotny, 442 U.S. 366, 378, 99 S.Ct. 2345, 2352, 60 L.Ed.2d 957 (1979), the Court has already determined that plaintiff sufficiently alleges intent to deprive her of her equal protection rights based on her gender. Thus, the President’s argument on this point provides no basis for dismissing Count II of the complaint.

3.

The Court next addresses the President’s argument that Count III of plaintiffs complaint fails to state an actionable claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress. Arkansas recognizes a claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress based on sexual harassment. Davis v. Tri-State Mack Distribs., Inc., 981 F.2d 340, 342 (8th Cir.1992) (citing Hale v. Ladd, 308 Ark. 567, 826 S.W.2d 244 (1992)). To establish a claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress, a plaintiff must prove that: (1) the defendant intended to inflict emotional distress or knew or should have known that emotional distress was the likely result of his conduct; (2) the conduct was extreme and outrageous and utterly intolerable in a civilized community; (3) the defendant’s conduct was the cause of the plaintiffs distress; and (4) the plaintiffs emotional distress was so severe in nature that no reasonable person could be expected to endure it. Milam v. Bank of Cabot, 327 Ark. 256, 937 S.W.2d 653, 658 (1997); Hollomon v. Keadle, 326 Ark. 168, 931 S.W.2d 413, 415 (1996); Cherepski v. Walker, 323 Ark. 43, 913 S.W.2d 761, 767 (1996); Croom v. Younts, 323 Ark. 95, 913 S.W.2d 283, 286 (1996).8 The Court finds that plaintiffs allegations are sufficient to state an actionable claim for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The President argues that plaintiffs factual allegations plainly purport to state claims for assault, battery, false imprisonment, spoken words, and harassment under state law, and that claims based on such conduct are governed by the one year statute of limitations forth in Ark.Code Ann. §§ 16-56-104; 5-1-109. He argues that because the alleged actions of which plaintiff complains occurred no later than February 1993 and the complaint was not filed until May 1994, plaintiffs claim in Count III of the complaint is time-barred and she cannot evade the governing *730time-bar by labeling her claim “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

It is true that a complaint simply saying that the lawsuit is one for a particular cause of action does not make it so. See Dunlap v. McCarty, 284 Ark. 5, 678 S.W.2d 361, 363 (1984). In cases raising questions regarding the nature of the cause of action, the Court must look to the facts alleged in the complaint to determine the true nature of the cause of action and whether the action is time-barred. Id. “If there is doubt as to which of two or more statutes of limitation applies to a particular action or proceeding, and it is necessary to resolve the doubt, it will generally be resolved in favor of the application of the statute having the longest limitation.” Jefferson v. Nero, 225 Ark. 302, 280 S.W.2d 884, 886 (1955).

Although it may well be the case that the alleged conduct of which plaintiff complains could fall within the rubric of other legal theories, there can be no doubt that such conduct is also encompassed by the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress. The Arkansas Supreme Court has held that one is subject to liability for the tort of outrage or intentional infliction of emotional distress if he or she wilfully or wantonly causes severe emotional distress to another by extreme and outrageous conduct. Sterling Drug Inc. v. Oxford, 294 Ark. 239, 743 S.W.2d 380, 382 (1988). See also Ingram v. Pirelli Cable Corp., 295 Ark. 154, 747 S.W.2d 103, 105 (1988). In M.B.M. Co. v. Counce, 268 Ark. 269, 596 S.W.2d 681 (1980), the Arkansas Supreme Court stated that “[b]y extreme and outrageous conduct, we mean conduct that is so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in civilized society.” Id. 596 S.W.2d at 687. The Court has previously detailed the alleged conduct on which plaintiff bases her lawsuit and will not repeat those allegations here. Suffice it to say that such conduct, if true, could well be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable for purposes of establishing á claim for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress. As this claim was also filed within the applicable three-year statute of limitations for such a claim, see O’Mara v. Dykema, 328 Ark. 310, 942 S.W.2d 854, 858 (1997), the Court denies the President’s motion for dismissal of Count III.9

4.

Lastly, the Court addresses the President’s argument that plaintiffs defamation claim in Count IV fails because it is founded on statements that are absolutely privileged, not actionable as a matter of law, and fails to allege defamation with the requisite specificity. The Court agrees with the President that the statements at issue in this case are absolutely privileged as a matter of law and, therefore, grants the President’s motion for dismissal of this claim on that basis.

a.

Statements made prior to the commencement of judicial proceedings are absolutely privileged if made in connection with possible litigation. Rodney A. Smolla, Law of Defamation § 8.03[l][b] and [c] (1996). Arkansas recognizes this privilege, see Pinkston v. Lovell, 296 Ark. 543, 759 S.W.2d 20 (1988); Selby v. Burgess, 289 Ark. 491, 712 S.W.2d 898 (1986), and it covers statements made by both attorneys and parties to the possible litigation. Smolla, supra, Law of Defamation § 8.03[l][b] and [c].10 The privi*731lege is narrowed closely by “relevancy” and “pertinency” requirements, however, and does not cover the publication of defamatory matter that has “no connection whatever” with the possible litigation. Pinkston, 759 S.W.2d at 23. Therefore, the two questions for this Court are (1) whether the statements of which plaintiff complains were made prior to possible litigation, and (2) whether these statements can be said to have had some connection with the possible litigation.

There can be no doubt that the statements at issue in this case were made prior to possible litigation as it was less than three months prior to the filing of the complaint that plaintiff and her attorney, at an event attended by the media, publically asked the President to acknowledge the alleged incident that is the subject of this lawsuit, to state that the plaintiff had rejected his advances, and to apologize to her. The President did in fact respond to the plaintiffs allegations and hired an attorney, and this lawsuit soon followed. Given these circumstances, the Court has no difficulty in concluding that the statements of both the White House aides and the President’s attorney were made prior to possible litigation for purposes of the privilege. Cf. McBride v. Pizza Hut, Inc., 658 A.2d 205 (D.C.1995) (concluding that the plaintiffs threat of suit constituted a proposed judicial proceeding under § 586 of Restatement and that the defense attorney’s letter containing a defamatory statement written in reply to the plaintiffs demand for a retraction of the charges of impropriety was therefore absolutely privileged).

The Court also concludes that these statements had at least some connection with the possible litigation as they did not go beyond that of simply responding to plaintiffs allegations with a general denial and questioning her motives. Indeed, the statements which plaintiff claims are defamatory are essentially the same statements contained in the President’s answer to the complaint, which no one disputes are absolutely privileged as statements made in pleadings. See, e.g., Selby, 712 S.W.2d at 900 (determining that an attorney has an absolute privilege to make statements in pleadings regardless of their truth or the existence of actual malice on the part of the attorney so long as the statements are relevant and pertinent to the pleadings). That being so, and given the timing and nature of both the plaintiffs allegations and the statements in response, the Court cannot say that these statements had “no connection whatever” to the possible and now pending litigation. Pinkston, 759 S.W.2d at 23.

In concluding that the statements at issue in this case are absolutely privileged, the Court is not saying that there can never be actionable defamation made in response to allegations of wrongdoing. As previously noted, the privilege on which this Court bases its decision is subject to and narrowed by “relevancy” and “pertinency” requirements. Pinkston, 759 S.W.2d at 23; Selby, 712 S.W.2d at 900. And, it is certainly true as a general matter that there is no absolute privilege to make defamatory statements to the news media when the news media is unconnected with a proposed judicial proceeding. See Scott Fetzer Co. v. Williamson, 101 F.3d 549, 554 (8th Cir.1996) (citations omitted). But where, as here, the challenged statements were nothing more than mere denials of the allegations and the questioning of plaintiffs motives (both of which mirror the *732statements contained in the answer to the complaint), and where such statements were only made following an event attended by the media in which the plaintiff and her attorney publically solicited a response from the party to whom the allegedly defamatory statements are attributed and then filed a lawsuit less than three months later, the Court has no hesitation in concluding that such statements qualify as statements made prior to and in connection with possible litigation and are therefore absolutely privileged. Cf. Johnston v. Cartwright, 355 F.2d 32, 37 (8th Cir.1966) (determining that under Iowa law, an allegedly defamatory statement in a newspaper was absolutely privileged where the statement was made in the heat of controversy, where an accusation of falsity and a challenge to prove had been made, and where all signs pointed to incipient litigation and to the necessity of protective action).

b.

Even were the Court to conclude that the statements of which plaintiff complains were not absolutely privileged, the fact that they were solicited by plaintiff precludes her from claiming in this lawsuit that she was thereby defamed. “It is axiomatic that ‘invited defamation,’ or the issuance of a defamatory statement wherein the injured party precipitated the statement’s release, is not actionable.” Litman v. Massachusetts Mut. Life Ins. Co., 739 F.2d 1549, 1560 (11th Cir.1984). See also Williams v. School Dist. of Springfield, 447 S.W.2d 256, 269 (Mo.1969) (“One who has invited or instigated the publication of defamatory words can not be heard to complain of the resulting damage to his reputation”); Kelewae v. Jim Meagher Chevrolet, Inc., 952 F.2d 1052, 1055 (8th Cir.1992) (determining that under Missouri law, allegedly defamatory statements cannot form the basis of a defamation suit where statements are solicited by agents of plaintiff). Here, plaintiff invited the President’s response to her allegations from a public forum and she cannot now be heard to complain that the responses issued in his behalf (to the extent they can be characterized as defamatory) were improper.11 Cf. Patton v. Cruce, 72 Ark. 421, 425, 81 S.W. 380 (1904) (“If one’s good name and character is assailed in a newspaper, he may, of course, reply, and defend himself, and if his reply is made in good faith, without malice, and is not unnecessarily defamatory of his assailant, the reply will be privileged”).

III.

For the foregoing reasons, the Court finds that President Clinton’s motion for judgment on the pleadings and to dismiss the complaint should be and hereby is granted in part and denied in part. The Court grants the President’s motion with respect to plaintiffs due process claims in Count I of the complaint and with respect to her defamation claim against the President in Count IV. The Court denies the President’s motion in all other respects. This case will go forward with respect to plaintiffs § 1983 sexual harassment claim against the President in Count I, her § 1985(3) conspiracy claim against the President and Ferguson in Count II, her state law claim for. the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress against the President in Count III, and her defamation claim against Ferguson in Count IV.