Trump files defamation and libel lawsuit against New York Times
President Donald Trump filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against the New York Times and four of its reporters, accusing the newspaper of libeling him in several articles in the lead-up to last year’s presidential election.
Trump’s attorneys listed examples of the reporters’ coverage that touched on a range of subjects, including his wealth, business empire and rise to national prominence. “At the time such statements were made by Defendants, they knew or should have known that they were false and defamatory,” the lawsuit said.
In an emailed statement Tuesday, the New York Times said: “This lawsuit has no merit. It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting.” The publication added that it “will not be deterred by intimidation tactics.”
The White House declined to comment.
Trump has frequently battled American media organizations in the courts and sparred over coverage he calls unfair or politically motivated. In his first term, Trump accused much of the news media of being an “enemy of the people.”
In Monday’s lawsuit, which seeks $15 billion in damages, Trump said that to win the presidency in 2024, he had to overcome “persistent election interference from the legacy media,” which he said was led by the New York Times. He also railed against the newspaper’s front-page endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, describing it as “deranged.”
Don Herzog, a law professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in the First Amendment, expressed doubts about the strength of some of the lawsuit’s claims and the scope of the damages Trump is seeking.
As a public figure, Trump would need to prove not just that a claim was false and defamatory, but that its publisher either knew that at the time or acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth, Herzog said in an email Tuesday.
“This is mostly a press release masquerading as a lawsuit,” he said.
Trump filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, naming as defendants the New York Times Company and reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt. Penguin Random House—the publisher of a book titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” which Buettner and Craig co-wrote—was also named as a defendant.
Trump accused the newspaper and its reporters of defaming him in the book and in three articles the president alleged were crafted “with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage” on him.
The lawsuit alleged that the articles, which delved into a series of Trump scandals and included acerbic quotes from his critics, damaged his reputation as a business executive, characterizing them as an attempt to “sabotage his 2024 candidacy” and “prejudice judges and juries” in cases brought against him.
The suit, assigned to U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee, also took issue with reporting in “Lucky Loser” on Trump’s tax records and finances. In 2023, a New York judge dismissed a case brought by Trump against the New York Times for a Pulitzer-winning investigation into his finances and ordered Trump to pay legal expenses for the reporters, two of whom were named as defendants in Monday’s suit.
Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, called the lawsuit Trump’s latest attempt to “weaponize defamation law to silence legitimate journalistic criticism and accountability reporting.”
“The complaint is full of bluster but short on any allegations of specific false statements of fact that would meet the rigorous standards for defamation claims brought by public figures,” she said.
Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders’ U.S. office, noted that while Trump has a long history of suing news outlets, “You can’t overstate the scale of the threat to press freedom.”
Harry Melkonian, a U.S. constitutional law expert at the University of Sydney, said that many of the allegations deal with “matters of opinion” rather than the kinds of “statements of fact” considered in defamation suits. He said it will be difficult for the president to succeed but conceded that “maybe that is an acceptable outcome for the President and his legal team.”
Melkonian said Trump might be looking for a vehicle to appeal up to the Supreme Court and have it reconsider the 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which established modern standards for defamation suits from public figures.
In a Truth Social post late Monday, Trump described the 174-year-old newspaper as “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country.”
“The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!” he wrote.
The suit comes days after Trump threatened to sue the Times for publishing articles related to a sexually suggestive note and drawing given to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
In July, Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and its parent company, accusing the newspaper of libeling him after it published an article that said he contributed a drawing of a naked woman as part of a bawdy 50th-birthday gift to Epstein in 2003. Initially, Trump’s attorneys described the document as “nonexistent.” After the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee released the book, which Epstein’s estate provided, White House officials said that Trump didn’t create the document and that the signature on it wasn’t his.
Also in July, Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, agreed to pay $16 million to settle a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Trump, stemming from the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Harris during the presidential campaign. Weeks later, the Federal Communications Commission approved the $8 billion merger of Paramount and Skydance Media. Although the company said the $16 million settlement was separate from the FCC’s review process, some critics saw the deal as a down payment on approval of the merger.
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