President Donald Trump has launched a sweeping $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times Co. and publisher Penguin Random House LLC, accusing them of acting as “mouthpieces” for the Democratic Party and damaging his reputation and brand. The complaint, filed Monday in federal court in Tampa, Florida, puts Trump on a direct collision course with one of the world’s most influential news organizations.
According to the suit, Trump claims he was harmed by three New York Times articles and a 2024 book released by Penguin Random House in the run-up to the 2024 election. The filing describes what Trump calls a “decades-long pattern by The New York Times of intentional and malicious defamation” against him. Among the grievances cited is the Times’ “deranged” front-page endorsement of then–Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 race — an editorial decision Trump says typifies the newspaper’s alleged bias, although it is not included in his formal legal claims.
The Times rejected Trump’s accusations outright. “This lawsuit has no merit,” a spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday. “It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting. The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics.” Penguin Random House, which published the book, did not immediately comment.
Trump announced the lawsuit on Truth Social, accusing the 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.” He is seeking $15 billion in damages for harm to what he calls his “one-of-a-kind, unprecedented personal brand,” which he values at more than $100 billion, plus unspecified punitive damages. “Defendants simply ignored their breach of journalistic ethics because the Book and the Articles would further the goals of the New York Times and its backers in the Democrat Party,” the complaint says.
In addition to the Times and Penguin, the lawsuit names Times reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt as defendants. It portrays the newspaper’s editorial approach as “industrial-scale defamation and libel against political opponents.”
The filing adds to Trump’s history of litigation against the media. In July, he sued Dow Jones & Co., News Corp. and Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion over a Wall Street Journal story alleging he sent a suggestive birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein; House Democrats later released the note as part of an Oversight Committee document trove. Trump also reached a settlement in July with Paramount Global over CBS News’s interview with then–Vice President Harris, and in December ABC agreed to give $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation or museum to resolve another defamation claim. Trump referenced the ABC settlement during remarks at the White House on Tuesday, before departing for a trip to the United Kingdom.
“Look, we want everything to be fair, it hasn’t been fair,” Trump said. “The radical left has done tremendous damage to the country, but we’re fixing it.”
Trump’s record in such cases has been mixed. A Manhattan judge dismissed his lawsuit against journalist Bob Woodward and a publishing house over the release of taped interviews from his first term. And in 2009, before he entered politics, Trump lost a $5 billion libel claim against Timothy O’Brien, then a New York Times editor, over a 2005 book questioning his billionaire status. O’Brien now oversees opinion columns at Bloomberg News.
The New York Times has said previously that Trump’s criticism has “never caused us to back down from our mission of holding powerful people to account, regardless of which party is in office.” Publisher A.G. Sulzberger reaffirmed in May that the paper would cover Trump “fully and fairly, regardless of what attacks it sends our way.”
Under the landmark 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, public figures such as Trump face a high bar to win libel suits, needing to prove that a statement was knowingly false or made with reckless disregard for the truth. Trump and some conservative activists have urged the Court to revisit that standard. In his social-media post announcing the new suit, Trump cited the Paramount and ABC settlements as evidence of a “longterm INTENT and pattern of abuse, which is both unacceptable and illegal.”
“The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!” Trump wrote.
The case is Trump v. New York Times Company, 8:25-cv-02487, U.S. District Court, Middle District of Florida (Tampa).
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