President Donald Trump’s $15 million defamation suit against The New York Times is a “publicity stunt” designed to intimidate the media by targeting the First Amendment’s freedom of the press, experts say. The lawsuit, filed in Florida on September 15, named four NYT reporters along with publisher Penguin Random House, alleges “malicious defamation” from media described as the “full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat party.’The lawsuit specifically names NYT reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt, whose articles are cited in it for alleged bias against Trump.””Put bluntly, Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way,” it reads.Filed just before the firing of ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel and two weeks after Trump filed a lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal (which Trump called a “third rate newspaper”) after they broke the story about his contribution to the birthday book of Jeffrey Epstein, this latest attack on media is meritless, says the NYT.”The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics,” the spokesperson said. “We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people,” a newspaper spokesperson said in a statement.Cases like these often get tossed out due to a anti-SLAPP laws, which stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, meant to protect free speech “from lawsuits intended to intimidate, silence or punish critics with burdensome legal costs,” explains The Tallahassee Democrat.Anti-SLAPP laws are meant to prevent frivolous lawsuits meant to silence whistleblowers and journalists.”Even if the case is meritless, you don’t want the case to be used as a way to punish people or harass people by using the legal process to impose burdens on them,” said Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel for the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, a national First Amendment watchdog.Despite the nature of his case against the NYT, one expert points to Trump judge shopping to favor his case.University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias noted that while the president’s primary residence is located in South Florida, he believes the case was filed in Central Florida purposely to favor his case, telling The Tallahassee Democrat that he believed Trump sought to get his case assigned to a judge he appointed, since in South Florida the only judge that has given him grace has been Aileen Cannon, who threw out Trump’s classified documents case.Tobias also says the NYT case is a joke.”It seems more like a press release or publicity stunt than a serious challenge to the New York Times,” he said.Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, agrees, and says the lawsuit was specifically designed to delegitimize news outlets who “expose him” and to use defamation laws to censor his critics. “Donald Trump knows full well that the suit lacks merit,” Stern said. “The goal is to intimidate the media to potentially extract a settlement.”
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