During a gathering with Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, January 9, 2025, in Palm Beach, Florida, President-elect Donald Trump delivered remarks. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
A mere four days post Donald Trump’s initiation of a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, a federal judge dismissed the case. The judge branded the complaint as “decidedly improper and impermissible,” emphasizing that lawsuits should not serve as a “megaphone for public relations.”
Senior U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, appointed by George H.W. Bush, issued a brief directive on Friday. This document removed the complaint from the court records, granting Trump and his lawyer Alejandro Brito 28 days to submit a revised version.
The judge described the complaint as a disorganized and boastful submission that fails under even the most lenient standards of Rule 8(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. This rule necessitates that a complaint must present “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.”
As the judge concluded, the complaint targeting the Times, journalists Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker, Michael Schmidt, and Penguin Random House spanned an 85-page document filled with “superfluous allegations,” including some praising Fred Trump, leading to its dismissal.
Judge Merryday noted that the complaint subjected its reader to laborious allegations, such as “a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished ‘Gray Lady.'” He mentioned other claims, like the urgency to attack with a biased intent rather than providing sincere journalism, and commented on the supposedly false narrative surrounding ‘The Apprentice.’ Furthermore, one of the many repetitive and self-celebratory statements venerated President Trump by stating, “‘The Apprentice’ represented the cultural significance of President Trump’s unmatched brilliance, capturing the spirit of our era.”
These lines and others railing against the “Russia Collusion Hoax” and Democratic Party “lawfare” against Trump, rather than simply and clearly outlining defamation claims, showed the lawsuit was being used to air “tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence, for the rehearsal of tendentious arguments, or for the protracted recitation and explanation of legal authority putatively supporting the pleaders claim, Merryday wrote.
In closing, the judge stated that every lawyer knows or should know that a lawsuit is “not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary” and “not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.”
Rather, the judge wrote, a lawsuit in federal court is meant to “fairly, precisely, directly, soberly, and economically inform the defendants — in a professionally constrained manner consistent with the dignity of the adversarial process in an Article III court of the United States — of the nature and content of the claims.”
Because the lawsuit “stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements of Rule 8,” Merryday said, it had to be struck from the docket.
Read the order here.
