President Donald Trump filed a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times on Monday, accusing the paper of persistent election interference and alleging its coverage harmed his 2024 campaign. The complaint was filed in federal court in Florida and does not identify a single specific factual error at the heart of the suit.
The complaint names several Times journalists, including chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and investigative reporter Michael Schmidt, and also cites reporting by Susanne Craig and Ross Buettner, whose reporting and a related book, "Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success," were singled out in the filing. The Times pushed back in a statement, saying: "This lawsuit has no merit. It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting." Trump posted on his social platform, Truth Social, that the paper is "one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country," accused it of acting as a "virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party," and called its coverage an "illegal Campaign contribution, EVER."
The suit comes amid a long-running adversarial relationship between Trump and The New York Times. The complaint focuses broadly on the paper's campaign and business coverage rather than pointing to discrete, allegedly false statements. It names corporate and editorial defendants as well as individual reporters and seeks damages totaling $15 billion.
Trump has previously pursued legal action against other news organizations and broadcasters. In recent years he secured settlements of $16 million each from ABC and CBS over broadcast segments he said were defamatory; those settlements were tied to separate broadcasts and edits. He also sued the parent company of The Wall Street Journal over reporting related to a birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein, a matter that remains disputed. Earlier in his career, Trump sued a Chicago Tribune critic in the 1980s over an architecture review; that suit was later dismissed as involving protected opinion.
The filing resumes a familiar pattern in which public figures bring defamation suits against news outlets. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, a public official or public figure must prove actual malice — that a defendant published a statement with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity — to prevail in a defamation action. Lawyers and First Amendment scholars generally say that opinion pieces and editorials are strongly shielded by the Constitution, and that proving actual malice is a difficult legal standard for plaintiffs who are public figures.
Reporting by The New York Times that is referenced in the suit includes investigative coverage of Trump’s finances and tax records, work that helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize. The suit does not single out one recent story or a discrete set of factual inaccuracies; instead it frames the paper’s decades of reporting as part of a campaign to undermine Trump, according to the complaint.
A Times spokeswoman reiterated the paper’s position that the lawsuit lacks merit. The case is in its early stages; the complaint was filed in Florida and the timeline for any legal proceedings has not been announced. The filing is likely to prompt pretrial motions from both sides, including challenges to the sufficiency of the complaint under the heightened actual-malice standard for public figures.
The litigation marks the latest high-profile clash between a sitting president and a major news organization, reviving legal and constitutional questions about defamation law, the press’s role in covering public figures, and the threshold for proving malice in politically charged reporting.
