President Trump on Thursday refiled his defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and several of its reporters, again accusing the news organization of seeking to undermine his 2024 candidacy and disparage his reputation as a businessman.
Last month, Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, threw out the president’s original 85-page complaint, saying it was unnecessarily discursive, laden with “florid and enervating” prose, and took too long to lodge formal allegations of defamation.
“A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” Judge Merryday wrote at the time. He gave the president’s lawyers 28 days to refile an amended complaint.
Mr. Trump’s revised legal filing on Thursday evening was 40 pages long, less than half the length of the original. One of the defendants in the original suit, the Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, is no longer cited as a defendant. Many of the original complaint’s lengthy tributes to Mr. Trump, like a sentence that described his 2024 election victory as “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history,” are no longer present.
As in the original filing, the amended complaint asks for $15 billion in damages.
Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against The Times is the latest in a series of actions against major news outlets. Both CBS News and ABC News agreed to pay $16 million each to settle lawsuits that Mr. Trump brought against the networks. The ABC late-night star Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily pulled off the air last month after Mr. Trump’s top communications regulator assailed his program and suggested that he might take regulatory action against the broadcaster.
Mr. Trump’s complaint against The Times claims that a pair of articles published in The New York Times sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman and television star of the reality show “The Apprentice.” One of the articles was written by Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, and the other by Peter Baker.
Like the original version of the complaint, the new filing also names as a defendant Penguin Random House, which published a book about Mr. Trump written by Ms. Craig and Mr. Buettner.
A spokeswoman for The Times said on Thursday night: “As we said when this was first filed and again after the judge’s ruling to strike it: This lawsuit has no merit. Nothing has changed today. This is merely an attempt to stifle independent reporting and generate P.R. attention, but The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics.”
A spokeswoman for Penguin Random House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The publishing house has previously referred to Mr. Trump’s claims as “meritless.”
A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team said in a statement on Thursday: “President Trump is continuing to hold the Fake News responsible through this powerhouse lawsuit against The New York Times, its reporters and Penguin Random House.”
Judge Merryday is an appointee of President George H.W. Bush. He had said that Mr. Trump’s original lawsuit ran afoul of legal requirements that a complaint be “a short and plain statement of the claim.”
Mr. Trump also sued The Times in 2021, over an article that examined his financial history; that suit was dismissed, and Mr. Trump was instructed to pay The Times’s legal expenses. Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign also sued the newspaper for libel in 2020 over an Opinion essay; that lawsuit was also dismissed.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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