Judge Dismisses Trump’s Lawsuit Against The New York Times

The judge said that the complaint failed to contain a “short and plain statement of the claim.” Mr. Trump has 28 days to refile.

A federal judge in Florida on Friday threw out President Trump’s defamation suit against The New York Times four days after it was filed, calling the complaint “improper and impermissible” in its present form.

The judge provided Mr. Trump’s lawyers with 28 days to file an amended complaint.

The lawsuit, which asked for $15 billion in damages, accused The Times and four of its reporters, as well as the book publisher Penguin Random House, of disparaging Mr. Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman.

But Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, said the president’s 85-page complaint was unnecessarily lengthy and digressive. He criticized Mr. Trump’s lawyers for waiting until the 80th page to lodge a formal allegation of defamation, and for including, ahead of it, dozens of “florid and enervating” pages lavishing praise on the president and enumerating a range of grievances.

“A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” Judge Merryday wrote. “Not a protected platform to rage against an adversary.”

He said any revised complaint must be limited to 40 pages.

“We welcome the judge’s quick ruling, which recognized that the complaint was a political document rather than a serious legal filing,” a New York Times spokesman said on Friday. A Penguin Random House spokeswoman said: “We applaud the judge’s decision.”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team said in a statement: “President Trump will continue to hold the Fake News accountable through this powerhouse lawsuit against The New York Times, its reporters and Penguin Random House, in accordance with the judge’s direction on logistics.”

The lawsuit was the latest broadside by a president who is spearheading the most severe government crackdown on media institutions in modern times. Mr. Trump sued The Wall Street Journal in July for an article concerning his relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, and he has sued CBS News and ABC News over their news coverage, extracting a $16 million settlement from each network.

Mr. Trump’s complaint against The Times this week claimed that a series of articles before the 2024 election were aimed at hurting his candidacy and caused “enormous” damage to his “professional and occupational interests.” The defendants included The Times and four of its reporters — Peter Baker, Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Michael S. Schmidt — as well as Penguin Random House, which published a book about Mr. Trump by Ms. Craig and Mr. Buettner.

The president’s complaint objected to certain details and anecdotes in The Times’s coverage. But it also digressed into lengthy tributes to Mr. Trump, citing his “singular brilliance” and describing his 2024 election win as “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history.”

Judge Merryday, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, referred to some of those asides as “tedious and burdensome” for a legal document, writing that “a complaint is not a megaphone for public relations.” He wrote that the complaint, as written, “stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart” legal requirements that complaints must be “a short and plain statement of the claim.”

Judge Merryday wrote that his order on Friday “suggests nothing about the truth of the allegations or the validity of the claims but addresses only the manner of the presentation of the allegations in the complaint.”

Mr. Trump sued The Times in 2021 over an investigation into his financial history; the suit was dismissed and Mr. Trump was ordered to pay The Times’s legal expenses. In 2020, his re-election campaign sued the newspaper for libel over an Opinion essay; that lawsuit was also dismissed.

Related Content