Donald Trump has filed a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and four of its journalists on Monday, accusing the newspaper of being a “a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.”
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida, claims the Times was “spreading false and defamatory content about President Trump” in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election. The suit cites three Times articles, as well as book written by two named Times journalists, that is claimed were “carefully crafted by Defendants, with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump, and all published during the height of a Presidential Election that became the most consequential in American history.”
The four Times journalists named in the lawsuit are investigative reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, who wrote the book Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, as well as Washington D.C. correspondent Michael S. Schmidt and White House correspondent Peter Baker.
The filing cites previous examples of lawsuits brought by Trump’s lawyers against Disney’s ABC News and Paramount Global’s CBS News, which resulted in multimillion-dollar payouts and public acknowledgments of inaccuracies in their reporting. In December, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump and released a statement of regret over the comments from Good Morning America and This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos that sparked the suit. In July, CBS News agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit from Trump, who sued over an October interview that 60 Minutes conducted with Kamala Harris.
In a post on Truth Social on Monday, Trump wrote about his “Great Honor” to file the $15 billion “defamation and libel lawsuit” against the Times. Trump added the newspaper was “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual “mouthpiece” for the Radical Left Democrat Party. I view it as the single largest illegal Campaign contribution, EVER.”
The post continued, “The “Times” has engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole. I am PROUD to hold this once respected “rag” responsible, as we are doing with the Fake News Networks such as our successful litigation against George Slopadopoulos/ABC/Disney, and 60 Minutes/CBS/Paramount, who knew that they were falsely “smearing” me through a highly sophisticated system of document and visual alteration, which was, in effect, a malicious form of defamation, and thus, settled for record amounts.”