There was a time, not so long ago, when a billion dollars in damages would have been an inconceivable sum to demand in any lawsuit, let alone a defamation case. Yet, as with so many other things, like ALL CAPS, Donald Trump has again managed to normalize the once unthinkable.
The British Broadcasting Corporation is just the latest media organization to find itself at the wrong end of a demand letter. At issue is the splicing together of two noncontiguous clips of Trump speaking to his supporters on January 6, 2021, in a documentary that aired on the network’s investigative series, Panorama.
Despite the resignations of two BBC staffers and a public apology, Trump attorney Alejandro Brito threatened to sue for a billion dollars in reputational damage. “The BBC is on notice,” he wrote on November 10, channeling his client. “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.” When asked if he thought Trump would follow through with his threat, BBC chairman Samir Shah remarked, “I do not know that yet, but he’s a litigious fellow, so we should be prepared for all outcomes.” Indeed, they should be.
Before the BBC, there was CNN: sued by Trump for $475 million, case dismissed in July 2023. ABC News: sued for unspecified monetary damages, settled for a $15 million donation to Trump’s future presidential “foundation and museum.” CBS News: sued for $10 billion for allegedly “paper[ing] over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness,” settled for $16 million on the cusp of Skydance’s merger with CBS parent Paramount. The Wall Street Journal: sued for $10 billion over its reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th-birthday book, litigation ongoing. The New York Times: sued for $15 billion for alleged “industrial-scale defamation and libel,” case tossed out by a Florida judge for being “decidedly improper and impermissible,” refiled by Trump’s lawyers last month. And that’s just the past three years.
I suppose the pomp of such exorbitant claims, measured against their more modest outcomes, should come as no surprise from a man who swears his marquee Midtown Manhattan tower has 68 floors, not the 58 listed in official city records. Or insists that his own height is six feet three inches, not the six feet two inches printed on his 2012 driver’s license.
The word “defame” comes from the 14th-century Latin diffamare, to “spread abroad by ill report.” “Libel,” from the Latin libellus—literally “little book”—is the “ill report,” or false written statement, that could land you in a court of law with an angry plaintiff. Depending on whom you ask, the matter of Crown v. Zenger was North America’s first libel case, in 1735, and introduced the legal principle that a true statement of public concern cannot be libelous. This principle has been the bedrock of modern American libel law since 1964.
So, what is the president’s libel scorecard? A 2016 article in the American Bar Association’s quarterly newsletter, Communications Lawyer, provocatively entitled “Donald J. Trump Is a Libel Bully but also a Libel Loser,” analyzed seven of Trump’s lawsuits going back to 1984. Of the seven, there were “four dismissals on the merits, two voluntary withdrawals, and one lone victory in an arbitration won by default.”
Among the defendants were a former Trump University student, a bartenders union, Miss Pennsylvania, and a Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic who called a proposed Trump skyscraper “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.” (“Men in public life,” wrote the judge, upon dismissing the case, “must accept as an incident of their service harsh criticism.”)
For fear of drawing its own libel suit, the A.B.A. reportedly attempted to spike the piece for being too partisan in tone, but then backtracked after the kerfuffle spilled onto the pages of The New York Times. “It is more than a little ironic,” a former chairman of the A.B.A.’s media-law committee told the paper, “that a publication dedicated to the exploration of First Amendment issues is subjected to censorship when it seeks to publish an article about threats to free speech.” (An A.B.A. spokesperson said that the organization’s leadership had asked for only “minor edits” to the article.)
In July, Axios—itself a defendant in an ongoing Trump suit—tallied up a total of 34 media and defamation cases involving Trump and his businesses since 2015, 10 of which were filed in the past two years alone: a “record wave of litigation.” Since 1984, it all adds up to more than 40 lawsuits, evidently very few of which he’s actually won. (It’s probably worth noting that this figure likely represents less than 1 percent of Trump’s total litigation count.)
Even Florida judges have grown weary of Trump’s libel blitzkrieg. “A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective—not a protected platform to rage against an adversary,” George W. Bush–appointed U.S. district judge Steven Merryday of Tampa wrote in his dismissal of Trump’s 85-page complaint against The New York Times in September. “A complaint is 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.” With that, he gave Trump’s legal team 28 days to refile a “short, plain, direct statement of allegations of fact,” not to exceed 40 pages, “excluding only the caption, the signature, and any attachment.”
Thirty-eight states have now enacted so-called anti-SLAPP statutes, which are intended to protect free speech from “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation,” or, as one could argue, the kind of thing Judge Merryday was writing about. Among other stipulations, anti-SLAPP laws allow defendants to win early dismissal of meritless libel suits, often with reimbursement for attorneys’ fees, and are designed to discourage powerful individuals and corporations from using frivolous litigation as a weapon to silence critics.
One of the most recent anti-SLAPP-related complaints was filed last month by Trump gadfly Michael Wolff against Melania Trump, after her lawyers threatened him with a $1 billion lawsuit over remarks he’d made about the First Lady’s alleged links to Jeffrey Epstein. “Mrs. Trump and her ‘unitary executive’ husband along with their MAGA myrmidons,” it read, “have made a practice of threatening those who speak against them with costly SLAPP actions in order to silence their speech, to intimidate their critics generally, and to extract unjustified payments and North Korean style confessions and apologies.”
Are there any clear victors in the Trump libel wars? Most famously, there’s E. Jean Carroll, the advice columnist who won an $83.3 million jury verdict against him last year, unanimously upheld by a federal appeals court this past September. “The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all of the Witch Hunts,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told CNN of the decision, “including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes.”
Lesser known but no less important is the curious case of Marvin Roffman. Back in 1990, Roffman, a securities analyst at the Philadelphia brokerage firm Janney Montgomery Scott, dared to predict to a Wall Street Journal reporter that Trump’s soon-to-open Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City was doomed to fail. Roffman figured the Taj would do well in the summer months after opening, “but once the cold winds blow from October to February, it won’t make it,” he told the reporter. “The market just isn’t there.”
First, Trump threatened to sue the firm if Roffman didn’t write an apology letter proclaiming the Taj “the greatest success ever.” Roffman refused, so the firm drafted the letter for him, in it declaring the Taj to be “unquestionably … the grandest and most successful” casino in the history of Atlantic City. Hoping to save his job, Roffman added his signature.
Signer’s remorse befell Roffman the next day, so he wrote to Trump again, this time in his own hand, disavowing the original letter. He was promptly fired. In the weeks that followed, Trump relentlessly and publicly castigated Roffman, calling him “a bad analyst” with “no talent,” “unprofessional,” and “a disgrace to his profession.”
But Roffman didn’t just skulk away. He fought back, suing Trump for $2 million for libel and slander, eventually winning an undisclosed settlement. “All I can say is Marvin Roffman is extremely happy with the settlement,” he told the Associated Press, referring to himself in the third person. A month later, in July 1991, the Taj Majal filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“The bottom line is that it was one of the worst experiences of my life,” Roffman, who voted for Trump in all three of his presidential elections, tells me. “But when I look back, he actually did me a tremendous favor.” Because Roffman couldn’t find work after the lawsuit, it forced him to start his own business, which became very successful. “It all worked out very well,” Trump would later tell Politico of Roffman’s lawsuit. “He turned out to be a very nice guy.”
Is Donald Trump an existential threat to the First Amendment and the guarantee of free speech? Probably not. But only as long as the future Marvin Roffmans of America stand up, speak out, and fight back.
Matt Kapp is the Research & Legal Editor at AIR MAIL
