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Media|Trump Refiles His $15 Billion Defamation Lawsuit Against The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/business/media/trump-lawsuit-new-york-times.html
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A federal judge had previously dismissed the complaint as unnecessarily lengthy and digressive. The president claims that The Times sought to defame him during the 2024 election.
Oct. 17, 2025, 12:05 a.m. ET
President Trump on Thursday refiled his defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and several of its reporters, again accusing the news organization of seeking to undermine his 2024 candidacy and disparage his reputation as a businessman.
Last month, Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, threw out the president’s original 85-page complaint, saying it was unnecessarily discursive, laden with “florid and enervating” prose, and took too long to lodge formal allegations of defamation.
“A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” Judge Merryday wrote at the time. He gave the president’s lawyers 28 days to refile an amended complaint.
Mr. Trump’s revised legal filing on Thursday evening was 40 pages long, less than half the length of the original. One of the defendants in the original suit, the Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, is no longer cited as a defendant. Many of the original complaint’s lengthy tributes to Mr. Trump, like a sentence that described his 2024 election victory as “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history,” are no longer present.
As in the original filing, the amended complaint asks for $15 billion in damages.
Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against The Times is the latest in a series of actions against major news outlets. Both CBS News and ABC News agreed to pay $16 million each to settle lawsuits that Mr. Trump brought against the networks. The ABC late-night star Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily pulled off the air last month after Mr. Trump’s top communications regulator assailed his program and suggested that he might take regulatory action against the broadcaster.
Mr. Trump’s complaint against The Times claims that a pair of articles published in The New York Times sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman and television star of the reality show “The Apprentice.” One of the articles was written by Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, and the other by Peter Baker.
