After a federal judge tossed Donald Trump’s $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, book publisher Penguin Random House and two Times reporters last month, the US president filed a 40-page amended complaint on Thursday.
US district court judge Steven Merryday in Florida gave Trump 28 days to refile and amend the action he threw out on 19 September.
The initial lawsuit named investigative reporters Suzanne Craig, Russ Buettner and Michael S Schmidt as well as the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker. All but Schmidt are still named in the amended complaint.
The amended complaint includes an itemized list of dozens of allegations tied to specific publications and statements. Like the first lawsuit, Trump is asking for $15bn in compensatory damages. He’s also asking for “punitive damages in an amount to be determined upon trial of this action”.
In his initial disqualifying ruling, Merryday cited rule 8(a) of the federal rules of civil procedure requiring a complaint to include a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.
“Alleging only two simple counts of defamation, the complaint consumes 85 pages,” Merryday wrote. “Count one appears on page 80, and count two appears on page 83 … Even under the most generous and lenient application of rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible.”
Merryday noted the “many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations”, and “much more, persistently alleged in abundant, florid, and enervating detail”.
The judge’s order does not address the truth of the allegations nor the validity of the claims, but said “a complaint remains an improper and impermissible place for the 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 pleader’s claim for relief”.
Both suits, filed in federal court in Florida, relate to the publication of a set of news articles in the New York Times describing Trump’s work on the television show The Apprentice and stories derived from the book Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, by Craig and Buettner.
They argue that the description of Trump as having been “discovered” as a potential host for the show is factually incorrect because Trump had long been famous before the show began.
It also argues that reporting in the book described Trump’s multimillion-dollar inheritance from his father, Fred C Trump, as a product of “fraudulent tax evasion schemes”, and that Trump’s father had been “twisting the rules” of federal programs used to support returning second world war veterans to build his fortune.
