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Donald Trump has filed a $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and four of its journalists.
The lawsuit, filed in a US district court in Florida on Monday, names several articles and one book written by two of the publication’s journalists and published in the lead-up to the 2024 election, alleging they are “part of a decades-long pattern by the New York Times of intentional and malicious defamation against President Trump”.
“Defendants published such statements negligently, with knowledge of the falsity of the statements, and/or with reckless disregard of their truth or falsity,” the lawsuit alleges.
The New York Times did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment early on Tuesday.
“The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform late on Monday.
He decried the newspaper as a “virtual ’mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party”, singling out the New York Times’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and accused it of lying about his “family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole”.
He provided no evidence for his claims.
The news outlet reported last week that Trump had threatened legal action against it in relation to articles on a lewd birthday note given to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Republican president has denied authoring the note.
Trump has previously gone after other media outlets. He filed a $10bn defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and the media mogul Rupert Murdoch in July after the newspaper published a story reporting on his ties to Epstein.
In a social media post late on Monday, the US president accused the New York Times of 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 president singled out the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and said it had become a “virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party”.
Trump cited previous examples of lawsuits 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.
