Former President Trump filed a $100 million lawsuit Tuesday against The New York Times and his niece, Mary Trump, accusing them of “tortiously breaching and/or interfering with his contractual rights and otherwise maliciously conspiring against him” for a 2018 report on his taxes.
“The defendants engaged in an insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records which they exploited for their own benefit and utilized as a means of falsely legitimizing their publicized works. The defendants’ actions were motivated by a personal vendetta and their desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall and were further intended to advance their political agenda,” the suit filed in New York’s Dutchess County states.
Trump is demanding no less than $100 million in damages.
The suit also names as defendants Times reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, who collectively earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for their “explanatory reporting” into Trump’s wealth based on tax documents they obtained.
The former president alleges the trio of journalists were “in the middle of an extensive crusade to obtain” his “confidential tax records” and that Mary Trump was convinced to “smuggle the records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over” to the paper.
The suit claims Mary Trump had access to “more than 40,000 pages of highly sensitive, proprietary, private and confidential documents, including, but not limited to, financial documents, accountings, tax records, income tax returns, bank statements, legal documents and other related documents” pertaining to the former president as a result of discovery during litigation related to the will of Mary Anne Trump, the mother of Donald Trump and grandmother of Mary Trump. The suit claims the documents were deemed confidential as a part of a settlement agreement.
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