new york –
Former President Donald Trump lost his lawsuit Friday against The New York Times and three investigative reporters over his 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning story about his family’s wealth and tax practices, and was ordered to pay nearly $400,000 in legal fees. It was done.
The paper and reporters Suzanne Craig, David Barstow and Russell Buettner were fired from the lawsuit in May. Trump’s claims against her estranged niece, Mary Trump, that she violated a prior settlement agreement by providing her tax records to reporters are still pending.
Given the “complexity of the issues” and other factors in the case, New York Judge Robert Reed ruled that Donald Trump should pay attorneys for the Times and its reporters a total of $392,638 in legal fees. He said it was reasonable not to do so.
“Today’s decision reflects the state’s newly revised law,” Times spokeswoman Daniel Rose Ha said, referring to a New York state law that prohibits frivolous lawsuits aimed at silencing critics. “This shows that the SLAPP Act can be a powerful force for protecting press freedom.” Such lawsuits are known as SLAPPs or strategic public participation lawsuits.
“The court has sent a message to those who seek to abuse the judicial system to silence journalists,” Rose Ha said.
In a separate ruling on Friday, Mr. Reed announced that Mary Trump, now the sole defendant, will continue to file lawsuits while she appeals a June ruling that allowed Donald Trump’s claims against her to proceed. refused the request to put it on hold.
Mary Trump’s lawyer declined to comment.
Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Haba said she remains disappointed that the Times and its reporters were removed from the case. She said she was satisfied that the court had “reaffirmed the strength of our case against Mary and rejected her attempts to avoid accountability”.
“We look forward to moving forward with the case against her,” Haba said.
Donald Trump’s lawsuit filed in 2021 accuses the Times and its reporters of relentlessly seeking out Mary Trump as a source and convincing her to hand over confidential tax records. She claimed reporters knew her previous settlement agreement prohibited her from disclosing documents she received in a dispute over the estate of her patriarch Fred Trump.
The newspaper’s report documents that his father, Fred Trump, gave Donald Trump at least US$413 million over several decades, including through tax avoidance schemes, adding to Donald Trump’s self-made wealth. refuted the claim that it was built. Mary Trump identified herself as the source of the documents in her book published in 2020.
The paper said that Donald Trump and his father avoided gift and inheritance taxes by creating fake corporations and understating their assets to tax authorities. The Times said its report was based on more than 100,000 pages of financial documents, including confidential tax returns of his father and his companies.
Donald Trump is seeking $100 million in damages, claiming Mary Trump, the Times and reporters were “motivated by a personal vendetta” against him. He accused them of engaging in “an insidious conspiracy to obtain confidential and highly sensitive records which they exploited for their own benefit.”
In dismissing the Times and its reporters from the lawsuit, Reed wrote that lawful reporting is “at the very heart of First Amendment protected activity.”
Mary Trump, 58, is the daughter of Donald Trump’s brother Fred Trump Jr., who died in 1981 at the age of 42. She considers her uncle to be “criminal, cruel and a traitor” and is an outspoken critic of her uncle.
In July, Mary Trump filed a countersuit against Donald Trump under New York’s anti-SLAPP law, calling Trump’s lawsuit “purely retaliatory and without merit,” and that it would “probably harm her or others in the future.” The purpose was to discourage others from criticizing Trump.
