US President Donald Trump has filed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, accusing the paper of running a “decades-long pattern” of lies and smears against him.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in a federal court in Florida, also named four Times reporters and the publisher Penguin Random House as defendants. It cites three articles published between September and October last year, along with a book by reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig.
“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.
According to the 85-page complaint, the newspaper and its reporters acted with “actual malice” by publishing false information and portraying Trump in the “most antagonistic and negative way”. It added: “Put bluntly, Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.”
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The complaint also alleged that the Times broke journalistic standards by not giving Trump enough time to respond before publishing.
Trump’s lawyers are asking the court to award at least $15 billion in compensatory damages, plus additional punitive damages.
The New York Times has not yet responded to the lawsuit.
This is not Trump’s first legal battle with the media. In July, he sued Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over a report linked to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The same month, Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle his complaint that CBS’s 60 Minutes edited an interview unfairly in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, his 2024 election rival.