Lawyers for President Donald Trump refiled a defamation lawsuit Thursday against the New York Times, with a complaint that is less than half as long as the previous one — after a judge spiked the president’s initial lawsuit for being “tedious and burdensome.” As before, Trump’s refiled complaint seeks an astronomical $15 billion in damages.
The New York Times, in a statement Thursday, reiterated its position that Trump’s lawsuit was meritless and said that “nothing has changed” with the new filing.
“As we said when this was first filed and again after the judge’s ruling to strike it: this lawsuit has no merit,” a Times spokesperson said in a statement. “Nothing has changed today. This is merely an attempt to stifle independent reporting and generate PR attention, but the New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics.”
Trump last month sued the Times, several of its reporters and Penguin Random House (publisher of the book “Lucky Loser” by two Times reporters), alleging that their reporting about the president’s finances and business career defamed him. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. A few days later, a federal judge threw out Trump’s suit, calling it “tedious and burdensome” and saying that a complaint is not “a protected platform to rage against an adversary.” In the ruling, Judge Steven D. Merryday gave Trump’s lawyers 28 days to refile the suit, ordering that the amended complaint be no more than 40 pages long and that it “accord with the rules of procedure.”
Trump’s refiled complaint is 40 pages (available at this link), less than half the original 85-page complaint. The new filing is shorter, but the main arguments are the same.
“As set forth below, Defendants originated and distributed these publications, and the defamatory statements about President Trump therein, with actual malice,” the revised complaint says. “The statements in question wrongly defame and disparage President Trump’s hard-earned professional reputation, which he painstakingly built for decades as a private citizen before becoming President of the United States, including as a successful businessman and as star of the most successful reality television show of all-time — The Apprentice.”
In his previous ruling finding Trump’s lawsuit “decidedly improper and inadmissible,” Merryday said that several statements in Trump’s initial complaint were unnecessary to make the president’s case. For example, he wrote, “in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, ‘The Apprentice’ represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time.”
Trump’s suit seeks compensatory damages of at least $15 billion as well as punitive damages, as well as a “retraction of the defamatory publications and statements” from the New York Times and Penguin Random House.
Separately, Trump this summer sued the Wall Street Journal, its parent companies Dow Jones and News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and two Journal reporters, alleging defamation over a WSJ story with details about a birthday letter Trump sent in 2003 to Jeffrey Epstein. According to the lawsuit, Trump is demanding “not less than $10 billion” on two counts of defamation, for at least $20 billion total. Last month, lawyers for the Wall Street Journal filed a motion to dismiss the suit, saying that Trump’s suit should be thrown out because the WSJ article in question “is true,” noting that in response to a congressional subpoena, “Epstein’s estate produced the Birthday Book, which contains the letter bearing the bawdy drawing and [Trump’s] signature, exactly as The Wall Street Journal reported.”
Among other litigation, Trump also sued ABC News and CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and reached separate $16 million settlements in each of those cases.
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