A New York state judge on Friday ordered former President Donald Trump to pay The New York Times nearly $400,000 for legal fees stemming from a failed lawsuit he brought against the newspaper in 2021.
Justice Robert R. Reed of the state Supreme Court in New York County ordered Trump to pay attorneys’ fees, legal costs and expenses totaling almost $393,000, including $229,931 for the Times and journalists Susanne Craig and Russell Buettner, and $162,717 for David Barstow, a third journalist from the paper.
Trump’s attorneys had opposed the dollar amount sought by the defendants, calling the figure “exorbitant, excessive and unreasonable.”
Reed last year dismissed the $100 million lawsuit against the Times and three of its journalists over their Pulitzer Prize-winning series on Trump’s undisclosed finances, published in 2018.
In 2021, Trump sued the paper, his estranged niece Mary Trump and others, alleging that his niece and the Times’ journalists “engaged in an insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records which they exploited for their own benefit and utilized as a means of falsely legitimizing their publicized works.”
In his ruling, Reed rejected that claim, saying Trump’s allegations against the Times “fail as a matter of constitutional law.”
A spokesperson for the Times lauded Friday’s order in a statement.
“The court has sent a message to those who want to misuse the judicial system to try to silence journalists,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha.
An attorney for Trump, Alina Habba, said Friday that the former president would pursue claims against Mary Trump.
“While we are disappointed that the NY Times is no longer in this matter, we are pleased that the Court once again affirmed the strength of our claims against Mary and is denying her attempt to avoid accountability,” Habba said in a statement. “We look forward to proceeding with our claims against her.”
The court last year denied a motion by Mary Trump to dismiss the case against her, which she appealed in June. This week the judge denied a stay of her case pending appeal and ordered her to appear virtually for a preliminary conference on Feb. 13.
