A federal judge on Friday dismissed President Trump’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, calling the complaint “decidedly improper and impermissible.”
U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday in Florida ruled that the 85-page lawsuit was unnecessarily lengthy and full of “tedious and burdensome” language irrelevant to the case.
“As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary,” the judge wrote in a four-page order. “A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally.”
Additionally, the complaint “stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements of Rule 8” of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires a short and plain statement showing that the plaintiff is entitled to relief.
“Even under the most generous and lenient reading of Rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible,” the judge wrote, citing Trump’s allegations that he won the presidential election “in historic fashion” and alluded to “persistent election interference from the legacy media, led most notoriously by the New York Times.”
The complaint, Merryday wrote, forces the reader to “labor through … repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations.” The judge specifically made note of one instance in which Trump boasted that his reality show “The Apprentice” represented the “cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance.”
Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee, gave Trump 28 days to file an amendment, which “must not exceed 40 pages, excluding only the caption, the signature, and any attachment.”
The multibillion-dollar lawsuit accused the New York Times, four of its reporters and book publisher Penguin Random House of undermining Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman.
“The Times has engaged in a decades long method of lying about (me), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our nation as a whole,” Trump wrote on his social media site when announcing the lawsuit on Monday.
On Friday, a spokesperson for the Times welcomed the judge’s ruling, “which recognized that the complaint was a political document rather than a serious legal filing.”
In July, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal after the newspaper published a story reporting on his ties to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
With News Wire Services
