A federal judge will allow Donald Trump to again amend his defamation lawsuit against , as the publication has moved to dismiss the litigation.
U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday gave Trump until August 27 to file the new complaint.
Trump sued the Times in September, taking particular issue with the premise that Trump’s celebrity fame was due to Mark Burnett and NBC’s The Apprentice. It cited an article from Susanne Craig and Ross Buettner, also named as defendants, and their book Lucky Loser. Their article was headlined, “The Star-Making Machine That Created ‘Donald Trump.’” Penguin Random House also is a defendant in the case, as is Peter Baker, who wrote a piece headlined, “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a
Moment of Judgment.”
.Merryday tossed out Trump’s original lawsuit, but allowed the president to refile. He filed an amended complaint in October, pointing out individual passages in the book and Times articles. Among those cited: “Mark Burnett’s The Apprentice fortified Trump’s fact-free bubble, while also making it national and bankable in ways that Trump never did on his own.”
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The Times and other defendants moved to dismiss the new complaint, arguing that the case was filed in an improper venue, Florida, rather than New York, and that Trump failed to “plausibly allege actual malice.” It also noted that “many of the challenged statements express the authors’ subjective interpretations of undisputed facts, which are not capable of being proven false.”
A hearing on the motion to dismiss was held last week, and the judge noted that Trump’s team asked for time to “cure any . . . deficiencies” by showing “why the Challenged Statements are not substantially true, along with additional facts and innuendo by Defendants to show why the Challenged Statements are defamatory, and additional evidence of actual malice for each Defendant.”
On Truth Social on Monday, Trump wrote that the Times “just failed again in their desperate attempt to have our powerful Defamation Lawsuit against them dropped. As we requested, the Highly Respected Judge has called for an updated complaint, which will lay out, in extreme detail, all the ways in which The Times has repeatedly and consistently acted, with actual malice in defaming me, my family, our Great MAGA Movement, and America, itself. We will continue to hold The Times and their ‘comrades’ in the Mainstream Media accountable for publishing, promoting, and dealing in Fake News.”
Charlie Stadtlander, spokesperson for The Times, said in a statement that the judge’s decision “makes no statement in support of the frivolous accusations in Mr. Trump’s earlier complaint. To the contrary, the judge simply gives him yet another chance to draft a complaint that demonstrates any legal merit. The president has had this chance twice previously and failed each time. The Times stands by our journalism, and the president’s legal pleadings will not change that or deter further reporting. We will continue to defend our reporters’ constitutionally protected rights — and the public’s right to know — and are confident in the laws that underpin them.”
