President Donald Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times and several of its reporters for defamation late Monday. The suit focuses on the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris during the election, as well as several other opinion pieces.
This is the second time since his reelection campaign in 2020 that he has filed a defamation claim against the news outlet.
The language in the official complaint claims that Americans who voted for Trump “saw the truth about him.” It continues to list published pieces the president took issue with, including four opinion pieces and an exposé book criticizing Trump’s business endeavors.
The book Trump takes issue with is titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.” Two New York Times journalists co-authored the book, but published their work independently through the Penguin Random House publishing group and had no affiliation with the news outlet itself for the project.
Regardless, “Lucky Loser” is being used as one of five central pieces of argument in Trump’s case, claiming that the Times is intentionally spreading defamatory content with ill intent.
Trump’s ongoing case against The Wall Street Journal, which was filed in July, surrounds their publication of an article linking him to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday album, a claim that his administration continues to deny the validity of.
Lecturer in digital and social media at USC Annenberg, Morten Bay, said that if he were a political communications practitioner under Trump, this would be a tactic used to “try and reduce criticism and get a more positive coverage” for the president via intimidation, not a tactic to destroy the publication.
Regardless of intentions, Bay clarified that he would like to see the case reach a public court hearing, “because Trump’s going to be out in three years regardless, and we need to establish that we can’t let this be the precedent.”
While discussing the lawsuit and the value of the free press, senior communications major Kerionya Carter said that the “president definitely shouldn’t have the authority to sue [the Times]. It’s the news. It’s just very weird and odd.”
Some state laws allow defendants to call for a motion to dismiss a case on the grounds that it is a “strategic lawsuit against public participation” or SLAPP. This option, known as an anti-SLAPP motion, is a protective measure against defamation cases made with the intent of intimidation or wasting a company or individual’s time and resources. There is no federal anti-SLAPP law and the president’s lawsuits have been automatically heard by a federal court, so some news organizations in prior cases have decided to settle.
Despite this, a settlement is not always the result of Trump’s lawsuits. For instance, his 2023 case against CNN for $475 million was thrown out by federal judge Raag Singhal because the network’s words were not reporting defamatory facts, but opinion, and CNN was therefore not eligible to be subject to a lawsuit of this nature.
In last year’s lawsuit against ABC, Trump sued anchor George Stephanopoulos for saying the then-former president had been found guilty of “rape,” when the official language used in his hearing had been “sexual abuse.”
Trump then sued CBS for a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris for $10 billion, claiming its editing was “malicious” and “deceptive,” and demanded the unedited transcript be released.
With no precedent legal strategy like an anti-SLAPP law to avoid a lengthy and expensive hearing in a federal court, these previous lawsuits were settled for $15 million in the case of ABC and $16 million in the case of CBS.
Because of this, Bay does not believe that the board of directors for the Times will allow the lawsuit to reach the court. Instead, he said that he believes this will be settled “very quietly,” as it was with ABC and CBS. Should a stand be taken by the Times, however, he clarified that the defendant would have a strong case.
Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit itself, Professor Bay predicts that this will result in a reshaping of the news landscape.
“Media outlets that claim to have non-political, non-partisan news coverage, I think, are going to stop endorsing, period,” Bay said. “I think that is the trend, and I don’t see that necessarily as a bad thing.”
This article originally misstated that Morten Bay is a professor of journalism. Bay is a lecturer in digital and social media under USC Annenberg’s communication department.