Federal judge immediately throws out Trump's lawsuit against the New York Times

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).

Just four days after Donald Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times alleging defamation, a federal judge threw out the complaint as "decidedly improper and impermissible," reminding the president along the way that lawsuits are not to be used as a "megaphone for public relations."

The brief order from Senior U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee, struck the complaint from the docket on Friday, affording Trump and his attorney Alejandro Brito 28 days to file an amended version.

In short, the judge characterized the complaint as a rambling, self-laudatory mess that is "decidedly improper and impermissible" even "under the most generous and lenient application" of Rule 8(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires that a complaint contain "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief."

Since the judge found the complaint against the Times, journalists Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker, and Michael Schmidt, and Penguin Random House was an 85-page document loaded with "superfluous allegations" — even details praising Fred Trump — it has been tossed out.

"The reader of the complaint must labor through allegations, such as 'a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished 'Gray Lady,'" the judge wrote. "The reader must endure an allegation of 'the desperate need to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass' and an allegation that 'the false narrative about 'The Apprentice' was just the tip of Defendants' melting iceberg of falsehoods.' Similarly, in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, "The Apprentice' represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump's singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time.'"

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These lines and others railing against the "Russia Collusion Hoax" and Democratic Party "lawfare" against Trump, rather than simply and clearly outlining defamation claims, showed the lawsuit was being used to air "tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence, for the rehearsal of tendentious arguments, or for the protracted recitation and explanation of legal authority putatively supporting the pleader's claim," Merryday wrote.

In closing, the judge stated that every lawyer knows or should know that a lawsuit is "not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary" and "not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers' Corner."

Rather, the judge wrote, a lawsuit in federal court is meant to "fairly, precisely, directly, soberly, and economically inform the defendants — in a professionally constrained manner consistent with the dignity of the adversarial process in an Article III court of the United States — of the nature and content of the claims."

Because the lawsuit "stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements of Rule 8," Merryday said, it had to be struck from the docket. The judge said it can be refiled within 28 days, however, so long as it doesn't have the same defects and doesn't "exceed" 40 pages.

Unsurprisingly, Trump's legal team has reportedly confirmed through a spokesman that it will refile the suit, calling it a "powerhouse," but this time "in accordance with the judge's direction on logistics."

Read the order here.