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Donald Trump’s $15bn lawsuit against The New York Times was struck down by a federal judge in Florida on Friday for being too long and lacking a “plain statement of the claim”.
The ruling by Judge Steven Merryday gave the president’s legal team 28 days to refile the suit. Nominated by president George HW Bush in 1991, Merryday noted that Trump’s 85-page filing only listed two defamation complaints.
“A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective [or] a protected platform to rage against an adversary,” he wrote. “A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations.”
The amended complaint, Merryday wrote, cannot exceed 40 pages.
Trump sued The New York Times on Monday, accusing the paper of being “a full-throated mouthpiece” of the Democratic party. It marked his fourth multibillion-dollar lawsuit against a US media company since March 2024.
In an interview with the Financial Times this week, Meredith Kopit Levien, chief executive of the NYT, said the suit was “legally baseless” and accused the president of deploying an “anti-press playbook” similar to those used by the leaders of Hungary and Turkey.
“The New York Times will not be cowed by this,” she said.
The suit against the NYT came amid growing concerns about the White House’s pressure on the press and media groups. This week, Disney-owned ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel, a late-night comedian who has been a fixture on ABC for more than two decades, after he discussed slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in his opening monologue on Monday.
Trump has been a source of material for Kimmel’s comedy routines for years, drawing the ire of the president, who has criticised the comedian in social media posts and public comments.
Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission, called the Kimmel comments a “very, very serious issue right now for Disney”, indicating that a regulatory review could be possible.
In his ruling on Trump’s lawsuit Merryday wrote that readers of the complaint “must labour through allegations” and “many, often repetitive, and laudatory . . . but superfluous allegations”.
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