U.S. President Donald Trump has taken legal action against The New York Times by filing a $15 billion defamation and libel lawsuit, escalating his ongoing confrontations with major media organisations.
The complaint, lodged in a Florida federal court, accuses the newspaper and several of its journalists of intentionally publishing misleading and damaging reports designed to ruin his personal and business reputation ahead of the last presidential election.
According to the court documents, the lawsuit targets not only various articles but also a book authored by Times journalists, alleging these works were produced with “actual malice” to inflict the greatest possible harm on Trump. The suit describes The New York Times as operating “as a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democratic Party.”
Defendants named include reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Michael S. Schmidt, White House correspondent Peter Baker, and publishing house Penguin Random House, which produced the book in question.
The legal claim follows earlier moments of tension after The New York Times published reports concerning a sexually explicit note and illustration allegedly signed by Trump. These were discovered within a “birthday book” given to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted as a sex offender and died by suicide in a New York jail cell in 2019.
Trump and his legal team have strongly denied involvement with the note, dismissing the allegations as fabricated. The White House quickly distanced Trump from any association with the document.
Trump announced the lawsuit on his social media platform Truth Social, declaring: “The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!”
Earlier this year, he obtained settlements from ABC News and CBS, who paid $15 million and $16 million respectively following defamation claims linked to coverage of his political rivals.
In a related legal move, Trump is pursuing a separate $10 billion defamation case against The Wall Street Journal. This lawsuit concerns the paper’s reporting on a letter allegedly written by Trump to Epstein in 2003, which was examined by criminal investigators during their probe into Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
These numerous media-related lawsuits set a new record for legal actions linked to Trump, showing the increasingly adversarial relationship between him and much of the U.S. press.
Meanwhile, some news organisations have initiated legal proceedings against Trump, defending freedom of the press against what they argue are retaliatory lawsuits designed to suppress critical coverage.