A federal judge in Florida declined to dismiss President Trump's $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, giving his legal team until late August to sharpen the complaint, a ruling both sides are spinning as a win.
District Judge Steven Merryday, who sits in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Tampa, refused to grant the Times's motion to toss the case on First Amendment grounds. Instead, he gave Trump's attorneys until August 27 to amend and refile the complaint. The Times will then have 21 days to respond. Merryday also postponed any ruling on the newspaper's separate request to transfer the case to the Southern District of New York, the Washington Examiner reported.
The procedural outcome means the lawsuit, one of the largest defamation actions ever filed against a major American newspaper, stays on the docket. And the Times, which asked the court to end the case outright, did not get what it wanted.
Trump took to Truth Social shortly after the decision, framing it as a clear defeat for the paper:
"The Failing New York Times, after 10 years of harassment, slander, and libel, just failed again in their desperate attempt to have our powerful Defamation Lawsuit against them dropped."
He added that the amended complaint would lay out "in extreme detail" the ways the Times allegedly acted "with actual malice" in defaming him, his family, and what he called "our Great MAGA Movement." Trump also pledged to hold the Times and its "comrades" in mainstream media accountable for what he described as fake news.
The Times pushed back hard. A spokesperson told reporters that the judge's decision "makes no statement in support of the frivolous accusations in Mr. Trump's earlier complaint," Fox News reported.
The spokesperson went further, arguing that Trump had already failed twice to draft a legally viable complaint:
"The President has had this chance twice previously and failed each time. The Times stands by our journalism, and the President's legal pleadings will not change that or deter further reporting. We will continue to defend our reporters' constitutionally protected rights, and the public's right to know, and are confident in the laws that underpin them."
Strip away the spin from both sides, and the bottom line is straightforward: the Times asked a federal judge to kill this lawsuit, and the judge said no.
Trump first filed the lawsuit in September, naming the New York Times Company, reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker, and Michael Schmidt, and publisher Penguin Random House as defendants. The original complaint ran 85 pages and targeted the paper's reporting on the 2024 presidential election as well as a book titled Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, co-authored by Craig and Buettner and published by Penguin Random House.
The lawsuit accuses the Times of operating as a "mouthpiece" for the Democratic Party and alleges a "decades-long pattern" of "intentional and malicious defamation" against the president. Those are Trump's legal team's characterizations, not judicial findings, but they set the framework for what the amended complaint will need to prove.
Shortly after the initial filing, Merryday struck down the original complaint. He did not dismiss the case; he ordered Trump's lawyers to come back with something tighter. His instruction was blunt: refile with "simple, concise, and direct" claims. He gave the legal team 28 days. In a line from that earlier ruling, Merryday wrote that "a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective, not a protected platform to rage against an adversary." Trump's attorneys have navigated similar procedural hurdles in other defamation actions, with mixed results.
Monday's ruling amounts to a second chance to get the complaint right. Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee, again declined to throw the case out and set the August 27 deadline for the next version.
The Times moved to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds, a standard defense in defamation cases involving public figures. Under the Supreme Court's New York Times Co. v. Sullivan standard, a public official must prove that a publisher acted with "actual malice", meaning the publisher knew a statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. That is a high bar, and media defendants regularly clear it.
Merryday did not rule on whether Trump can meet that standard. He simply declined to end the case at this stage, choosing instead to let Trump's team take another pass at the complaint before the court evaluates the merits. The lawsuit stems from two articles and a book published ahead of the 2024 election that Trump claims defamed him, Just The News reported.
For the Times, the risk is not just financial, though $15 billion would be existential for any media company. The risk is procedural: a case that survives a motion to dismiss moves into discovery, where Trump's legal team could demand internal communications, editorial deliberations, and sourcing records. That prospect alone changes the dynamic for any newsroom.
The Times lawsuit is not an isolated action. Trump has filed a $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC over its editing of his January 6, 2021 speech, a case that has already drawn attention for subpoena disputes involving the Secret Service. Two top BBC executives resigned in connection with that case.
Last summer, Trump also filed a libel lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting on Jeffrey Epstein. The combined value of these media lawsuits runs into the tens of billions, numbers that reflect not just alleged damages but a strategic calculation about the cost of defending prolonged litigation.
Trump's broader legal strategy extends well beyond media cases. His attorneys have pursued consolidation of other civil judgments, and federal courts have handed down a range of outcomes in Trump-related litigation this year.
The pattern is clear enough: Trump is using the courts to challenge media coverage he considers defamatory, and he is doing it on a scale no president has attempted before. Whether any of these suits ultimately succeed on the merits remains an open question. But survival past a motion to dismiss is itself a form of leverage, it keeps the case alive, keeps the legal bills running, and keeps the possibility of discovery on the table.
Trump's legal team now has roughly four weeks to file the amended complaint. If the pattern holds, the new version will need to be sharper and more specific than the 85-page original that Merryday already rejected once for being too broad and too combative. The judge has made clear he wants focused legal claims, not political rhetoric dressed up as a court filing.
Once the amended complaint lands, the Times gets 21 days to respond. Merryday will then face the question he postponed on Monday: whether the case belongs in Tampa or should move to New York, and whether the Times's First Amendment defense warrants dismissal on the merits.
Several questions remain unanswered. No written opinion from Monday's ruling has surfaced explaining Merryday's reasoning beyond the procedural deadlines. The specific articles and passages at issue, beyond the general references to 2024 election coverage and the Lucky Loser book, have not been detailed publicly. And the broader trend of federal judges weighing in on politically charged cases continues to shape the legal landscape.
The Times says it stands by its journalism. Trump says the paper defamed him for a decade. A federal judge in Tampa just told both sides the fight is not over, and gave Trump another chance to make his case. For a paper that wanted this lawsuit buried, that is not the outcome it asked for.
When a news organization asks a court to shut down a defamation suit and the court refuses, the journalism is no longer the only thing on trial, the institution's credibility is, too.