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US President Donald Trump has filed a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, seeking $15bn in damages from the media organisation that he accused of being a “mouthpiece” for the Democratic party.
In a filing to a US district court in Florida late on Monday, lawyers for Trump accused the NYT of “spreading false and defamatory content” about the president.
“The Times has betrayed the journalistic ideals of honesty, objectivity, and accuracy that it once professed,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.
They accused the NYT of being “a full-throated mouthpiece” of the Democratic party and “a leading, and unapologetic, purveyor of falsehoods against President Trump”.
The lawsuit also accuses the NYT and other “legacy media” of election interference, citing the paper’s endorsement of his opponent in the 2024 presidential race, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
The defamation lawsuit against the NYT is the fourth multibillion-dollar lawsuit Trump has filed against a major US news organisation since March 2024.
Both ABC News and CBS News settled separate lawsuits by paying $15mn to Trump’s future presidential library and another $1mn to cover legal fees. In July, Trump sued The Wall Street Journal for $10bn over publishing an article about a lewd birthday card he allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein.
The latest suit referred to articles based on Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, a book by NYT reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, which were published in the paper in mid-September. The lawsuit refers to one of the articles as “defamatory, malicious, and false”.
The lawsuit criticised Craig and Buettner for their portrayal of Trump’s role in the success of his reality television show The Apprentice. The filing said the show “represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time”.
Subsequent pieces in the NYT published ahead of the November election were also singled out in the lawsuit, one of which was described as an “election-interfering salvo”.
Together, the stories were “part of a decades-long pattern . . . of intentional and malicious defamation”, said the lawsuit.
Trump is seeking compensatory damages of “not less than $15bn”, as well as punitive damages to be determined by the court.
Trump sued the NYT in 2020 over an opinion column that alleged a conspiracy between his 2016 campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. That lawsuit was dismissed as “protected speech”.
In 2021, he sued the NYT, several of its reporters and his niece Mary Trump, whom he accused of illegally obtaining documents related to his tax returns for an investigation into his finances. That lawsuit was also dismissed.
The NYT could not immediately be reached for comment.
