Trump maintains that the interview misled voters and caused him to incur personal financial harm. He initially sought an award of $10 billion but changed course and is now requesting a total of $20 billion. The damages, if awarded, would also include compensation for alleged “mental anguish.”
President Donald Trump and his legal team have formally objected to Paramount Global’s motion to dismiss his $20 billion lawsuit, which was filed after Paramount-owned CBS shared a segment the White House claims was tantamount to election interference.
As LegalReader.com has reported before, President Trump filed the lawsuit against Paramount and CBS several days after the 2024 general election came to an end. In it, the president claims that a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris was deceptively edited through the removal of fumbles and flops.
Trump maintains that the interview misled voters and caused him to incur personal financial harm. He initially sought an award of $10 billion but changed course and is now requesting a total of $20 billion. Trump justified these amounts by claiming that the speech hurt the president’s status as a “content creator.”
The damages, if awarded, would also include compensation for alleged “mental anguish.”
Interestingly, an attorney for Trump said that the president isn’t alone in his suffering: the supposedly-doctored interview “led to widespread confusion and mental anguish of consumers, including plaintiffs, regarding a household name of the legacy media apparently deceptive distorting its broadcasts, and then resisting attempts to clear the public record.”
In Trump’s motion to dismiss, attorneys argued that CBS’s “conduct … including news distortion, constituted commercial speech which cannot by any reasonable interpretation be found to have constituted editorial judgment, and that speech damaged Plaintiffs.”
“The fact that such commercial speech was issued by a news organization does not insulate Defendants from liability under the First Amendment,” the motion states. “[T]he First Amendment is no shield to news distortion.”
Paramount, for its part, has called the objection “an affront to the First Amendment,” without any “basis in law or fact.” Additionally, CBS News asserted that the broadcast of the Harris interview was in no way “doctored or deceitful.”
Nevertheless, Paramount is continuing to court controversy by engaging in settlement talks with Trump. Given the lawsuit’s apparent failure to accurately recount real-life events, critics like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have suggested that any settlement would be tantamount to a bribe.
In a letter penned alongside Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden, Sanders wrote that Paramount may “be engaging in improper conduct involving the Trump administration in exchange for approval of its merger with Skydance Media.”
“Paramount’s capitulation would also undermine two essential pillars of a liberal democracy: a free press and an impartial, rule-of-law regulatory system,” the senators said.
“The American people deserve to know whether media companies are negotiating with public officials in ways that compromise journalistic independence,” they said. “Such actions could amount to a violation of federal law.”
Sources
Trump suffered ‘mental anguish’ from disputed CBS News interview with Harris, lawyer says
US senators warn Paramount’s Shari Redstone that settling Trump’s CBS lawsuit could be ‘bribery’
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