Donald Trump has filed a $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times in his latest use of legal action targeting a major media outlet.
The US president accused it of being a “mouthpiece” for the Democratic party and of “spreading false and defamatory content” about him.
It comes after the New York Times said last week that it had been threatened with legal action by the White House, following articles about a crude birthday note given to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The note bears Trump’s signature, but the president has denied being its author.
In July he launched legal action against another big US paper, the Wall Street Journal, and its proprietor Rupert Murdoch, after it first reported the existence of the note, which also featured a lewd drawing. It has since been published, but Trump continues to deny being its author.
The filing against the NYT, the latest demonstration of the president’s willingness to use legal action against the media, was made by Trump’s lawyers to a district court in Florida on Monday night.
It names several articles and one book written by two of the publication’s journalists and published in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
“The Times has betrayed the journalistic ideals of honesty, objectivity, and accuracy that it once professed,” it states, also accusing the NYT of being “a leading, and unapologetic, purveyor of falsehoods against President Trump”.
The NYT has not yet responded.
The suit accuses the NYT, as well as other “legacy media” regarded as opponents, of engaging in election interference. It points to the paper’s decision to endorse the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the last presidential race.
The NYT made the endorsement while other major outlets took the unusual move of refusing to endorse a candidate in the race. The Washington Post, owned by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, opted against endorsing a candidate.
The decision was criticised by some as an attempt to appease Trump and led to a backlash among subscribers and Post employees.
The case against the NYT is just the latest of several multibillion-dollar lawsuits Trump has launched against US media outlets since his return to the White House.
Lawsuits have been brought against ABC News and the anchor George Stephanopoulos, as well as Paramount over its 60 Minutes interview with Harris. Both cases were settled for $15m and $16m respectively. The case against the Wall Street Journal is ongoing.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump denounced the NYT as “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,” he said, though he did not provide any evidence for the claim. “Their Endorsement of Kamala Harris was actually put dead center on the front page of The New York Times, something heretofore UNHEARD OF!
“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.”
The lawsuit cites articles in the NYT based on Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, a book by the reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.
“Defendants maliciously published the book and the articles knowing that these publications were filled with repugnant distortions and fabrications about President Trump,” the filing states. Penguin Random House, the publisher of the book, has not yet commented on the suit.
Articles in the NYT to be cited in the filing include one published before the November election, which was described as an “election-interfering salvo”. The suit says the articles were part of a long-term pattern of “intentional and malicious defamation”. It seeks damages of “not less than $15bn”.
Trump’s team has previously filed a libel suit against the NYT in relation to an opinion article related to Russian interference in the 2016 US election. It was later dismissed as “protected speech”.
Trump also has sued the newspaper and his estranged niece over a 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax arrangements, describing it as an “insidious plot” to obtain his records. A New York judge threw out the case in 2023.
