Donald Trump called the media “the enemy of the American people” in a social media post a month after he was first sworn in as president in 2017. Since then, both in his personal capacity and as president, he has taken aim at media outlets and personalities he dislikes.
The new president’s pronouncement back then set off alarm bells. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), a vocal critic of Trump who didn’t seek reelection in 2018, excoriated the president on the Senate floor for using a phrase “infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin.” Others, including veteran CBS News correspondent Marvin Kalb, drew parallels to Sen. Joseph P. McCarthy’s Red Scare bombast in the 1950s.
Nine years and another election later, Trump and members of his administration have escalated their words into action, raising alarm among free press groups. After the Pentagon introduced a new press policy that press freedom groups called restrictive, journalists walked out en masse rather than comply. The Defense Department filled their seats with friendly, largely right-wing media instead. Trump and his allies in the government have also threatened to yank broadcast licenses for news outlets deemed oppositional.
Last week, the FBI executed a search warrant on the home of a Washington Post reporter, a move newsroom leaders and press freedom groups condemned as a threat to the First Amendment rights of reporters and chilling for their confidential sources.
But in his personal capacity, both before and after his election to a second term, Trump has also turned to litigation against media outlets. He has filed a flurry of lawsuits, alleging that media companies have defamed him and marred his reputation. Two of the first lawsuits Trump filed — against ABC and CBS — were settled for millions of dollars at a time their parent companies were seeking regulatory approval for certain transactions. Others are ongoing and some have been dismissed.
ABC and CBS’s respective parent companies, Disney and Paramount Skydance, did not respond to requests for comment. The Post has been sued by Trump’s social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social. The case is pending in federal court in Florida.
Here is a running tally of where Trump’s lawsuits against media companies stand.
Settled
ABC
Trump sued ABC for defamation in March 2024 following an interview in which host George Stephanopoulos incorrectly alleged that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The journalist was referring to a Manhattan federal jury having found him liable for sexual abuse in the case of E. Jean Carroll, who said Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
In May 2023, that jury awarded Carroll, a former advice columnist who publicly accused Trump of rape in 2019, a combined $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation. However, the jury specifically did not find Trump liable for rape, answering “no” on the verdict form to the question of whether “Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll.”
In July 2023, a judge rejected an effort by Trump’s lawyers to call for a new trial on the grounds that the $5 million award for sexual abuse was excessive because sexual abuse could be as limited as the “groping” of a victim’s breasts. “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
In January 2024, in a separate defamation case in the same court, Carroll was awarded $83.3 million in damages for statements Trump made that disparaged her and denied her sexual abuse allegations. (An appeals court panel upheld the sexual abuse and defamation findings. A separate panel also upheld the $83.3 million verdict). Trump continues to pursue appeals of both judgments.
Legal observers were divided over the merit of Trump’s claim against ABC. Stephanopoulos had been inaccurate, some noted, but defamation claims by public figures require proving “actual malice,” a high bar that goes beyond negligence or ill will. In December 2024, a month after Trump was elected to a second term, the network settled the case by agreeing to pay a $15 million “charitable contribution” to a future presidential foundation for construction of Trump’s presidential library, covering $1 million in legal fees, and appending a statement of regret to the segment.
The settlement came just weeks before ABC’s parent company, Disney, announced its acquisition of sports streaming service Fubo in a deal that was intended to create a YouTube TV rival — and require regulatory approval. The Justice Department approved the deal in October. Disney is also awaiting government approval on a deal that would see subsidiary ESPN acquire NFL Network. Disney did not respond to a request for comment.
CBS
Trump sued CBS in October 2024 alleging the network’s flagship news program, “60 Minutes,” had been “deceitful” in editing an interview with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. His suit alleged the network’s handling of the interview amounted to “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the coming election in her favor. “60 Minutes” aired one version of Harris’s answer to a question about Gaza and Israel while another, wordier version appeared on the CBS Sunday morning show “Face the Nation.” Trump’s lawyers claimed the shorter version was edited to make Harris look better and improve her election prospects, whereas CBS said the interview had been edited for length.
Initially, a CBS spokesperson said the lawsuit was “completely without merit,” and many First Amendment lawyers said it was unlikely to succeed. By April, however, with Trump back in the White House, the two sides were in mediation. In July, CBS agreed to settle the lawsuit for $16 million to be paid to a future Trump presidential library. The network issued no apology.
The agreement came amid CBS parent company Paramount’s $8.4 billion merger with David Ellison’s Skydance Media. The acquisition received regulatory approval weeks after the CBS settlement, which CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert, a frequent Trump critic, called “a big fat bribe.” Colbert’s show was canceled three days later, though the network said it was “purely a financial decision.” Paramount Skydance did not respond to a request for comment.
Ongoing
The Pulitzer Prize Board
Trump sued 20 members of the Pulitzer Prize Board in December 2022, alleging they defamed him by refusing to revoke the 2018 prize for national reporting awarded to the New York Times and The Post for coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to the Trump campaign.
The suit, filed in state circuit court in Florida’s Okeechobee County, does not directly challenge the newspapers’ reporting or the original decision to award the prizes. Instead, it targets the board’s 2022 statement responding to Trump’s demands that the prizes be rescinded. The board said it had commissioned two independent reviews, both of which concluded “that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”
Trump’s complaint alleges the statement falsely implied he had colluded with Russia despite the findings of congressional inquiries and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, which resulted in no criminal conspiracy charges.
The Pulitzer Board defendants include prominent journalists and editors from the New Yorker, the Boston Globe and the Atlantic.
In July 2024, a Florida state judge, Robert Pegg, rejected motions to dismiss the case, ruling that the board’s statement did not provide enough factual information to be considered protected opinion. Pegg noted that its statement failed to “address if or how the ‘independent reviewers’ were able to verify the anonymous sources” in the award-winning articles.
The case appears far from resolution. In December 2025, the Pulitzer board filed demands for Trump’s tax returns dating back to 2015 and his medical and psychological records, arguing that if he is claiming damages for mental or emotional injury, he must provide documentation. “Just like any other plaintiff, the President must articulate and prove his claims with evidence,” a board spokesperson said.
The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer
Trump sued the Des Moines Register and Iowa pollster Ann Selzer in December 2024 for publishing a poll three days before the presidential election that showed Trump trailing Vice President Kamala Harris. It alleged that the defendants had breached consumer protection laws by committing “election interference” and claimed the newspaper and pollster “hoped that the … [poll] would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris” in the last week of the campaign.
Trump won the state by a 13-percentage-point margin. In response to his lawsuit, a spokeswoman for Gannett, the Register’s parent company, said the newspaper stood by its reporting. Selzer analyzed her work after the election, writing that she reviewed the polling data and could find nothing to “illuminate the miss.”
After Trump’s lawyers filed the lawsuit in Iowa state court, the Register and Selzer had the case moved to federal court and filed a motion to dismiss it as meritless. In October 2025, a federal appeals court ruled Trump could withdraw the suit from federal court and proceed with the new version of the claim in state court. That case is pending.
The Wall Street Journal
Trump sued the Wall Street Journal; its parent company, Dow Jones; News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch; News Corp CEO Robert Thomson; and Journal reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo for $10 billion in July 2025, alleging that the newspaper defamed him by publishing an article about a lewd drawing purportedly signed by him and given to financier Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003.
The Journal reported that the drawing, one of dozens collected by Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, included several lines of text inside the outline of a naked woman and ended with: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump denied writing the note, telling the Journal that it was “a fake thing” and that he doesn’t “draw pictures of women.”
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, was assigned to Judge Darrin P. Gayles, an Obama appointee. The defendants moved to dismiss the case in September 2025, arguing that the article was factual and that the House Oversight Committee had since publicly released the birthday book containing the letter.
In their motion, the Journal’s lawyers wrote that the suit was “an affront to the First Amendment” and that Trump “brought this lawsuit to silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public.”
Many legal experts have said the case is weak. To prevail, Trump would need to prove actual malice — that the Journal knew the story was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
The suit marked a move against a longtime ally in Murdoch. Opinion hosts on Fox News, owned by Murdoch’s News Corp., have long championed Trump throughout his political rise, and many have joined his administrations. Trump said on Truth Socialthat he personally warned Murdoch not to publish the story. Murdoch told associates he would not be intimidated, according to three people familiar with his comment who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to relay a private conversation.
The New York Times (2025)
Trump sued the New York Times, four of its reporters and book publisher Penguin Random House for $15 billion in September 2025, alleging that the newspaper’s reporters defamed him in the 2024 book “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” and in several articles about his wealth, business career and rise to national prominence.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, named Times reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt as defendants, along with the New York Times Company and Penguin Random House, which published the book co-written by Craig and Buettner.
U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee, dismissed the original 85-page complaint in a September 2025 ruling, calling it “decidedly improper and impermissible” and saying it read more like a political document than a serious legal filing.
A complaint, Merryday wrote, is not “a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally.” He allowed Trump to attempt to address the problems in an amended complaint not to exceed 40 pages. Trump’s lawyers refiled the suit in October 2025 at exactly 40 pages, dropping reporter Schmidt from the litigation.
The amended complaint challenges dozens of statements from the book and two Times articles, alleging they falsely portrayed Trump as a failed businessman who owed his wealth to his father and whose image was fabricated by television producers. The suit claims Craig and Buettner “received stolen tax returns” and that the Times has a pattern of resolving “any factual ambiguities or uncertainties in their reporting in the way that will harm President Trump.”
The Times has called the suit meritless. “This is merely an attempt to stifle independent reporting and generate PR attention, but The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics,” a spokesperson said. In December 2025, the Times filed a motion to dismiss the amended complaint. The case is pending.
The BBC
Trump sued the British Broadcasting Corporation for up to $10 billion in December 2025, alleging that an episode of its documentary series “Panorama” defamed him by misleadingly editing his Jan. 6, 2021, speech to make it appear he explicitly encouraged the violence that day at the U.S. Capitol.
The episode, “Trump: A Second Chance?,” aired in the United Kingdom days before the 2024 presidential election. In November 2025, the Telegraph published a whistleblower report from Michael Prescott, a former BBC editorial standards adviser, who criticized the documentary for splicing together different parts of Trump’s speech.
BBC Director General Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness resigned later that month amid the fallout from the whistleblower report.
The BBC apologized for the edit but rejected any legal basis for a defamation claim. “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim,” the broadcaster wrote in a Nov. 13 statement.
Trump filed suit on Dec. 15 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging defamation and a violation of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, and seeking $5 billion for each count. The case was assigned to Judge Roy K. Altman.
The statute of limitations for defamation in Britain is one year, leaving the president with no legal recourse there.
Legal experts have said Trump faces significant hurdles. Since he has chosen to bring the suit in the U.S., he will need to show that the BBC satisfied the stringent “actual malice” standard for public figures — meaning that BBC either knew the challenged statements were false and published them anyway, or acted with “reckless disregard” for their truth or falsity.
The case also may raise jurisdictional issues. The BBC has argued that the documentary never aired in the United States, though Trump’s lawyers have countered that it could have been accessed by U.S. subscribers of certain streaming services or through virtual private networks.
Dismissed
The New York Times (2020)
The Trump campaign sued the New York Times in 2020 over an opinion column by Max Frankel published the previous year that it claimed was false in alleging a quid pro quo relationship between the campaign and Russian officials ahead of the 2016 election. A judge in New York state court dismissed the lawsuit in 2021, finding that the opinion piece constituted protected speech under the First Amendment.
The Washington Post
One week after suing the Times in 2020, Trump’s presidential campaign also sued The Post. The suit similarly concerned two opinion columns alleging a connection between the campaign and Russian election interference. In 2023, a federal judge in Washington dismissed the suit on similar grounds.
CNN
Trump sued CNN in a $475 million defamation lawsuit in 2022. The lawsuit claimed that the cable network ran a “campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander” because it feared that Trump would run for reelection. Trump’s lawyers focused on the network’s use of the term “the ‘big lie’” to refer to Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him. A federal judge, appointed by Trump, dismissed the lawsuit in 2023. “CNN’s statements while repugnant, were not, as a matter of law, defamatory,” U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal wrote.
The New York Times (2021)
In 2021, Trump sued the New York Times, along with three of its reporters and his niece Mary L. Trump, for what he called an “insidious plot” to obtain his tax records and release them to the public. While claims against his niece were allowed to proceed, a New York Supreme Court justice dismissed the lawsuit against the Times and its reporters in 2024, and ordered Trump to pay the news organization nearly $400,000 to cover its legal fees.
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