The co-manager of President Donald Trump’s profitable 2024 marketing campaign sued the Day by day Beast for defamation Monday over tales concerning how a lot he was paid for his work.
The lawsuit on behalf of Chris LaCivita mentioned the web publication’s tales that he was paid $22 million over two years — later corrected to $19.2 million — “created the false impression that Mr. LaCivita was personally profiting excessively from his work for the campaign and that he was prioritizing personal gain over the campaign’s success.”
The Day by day Beast mentioned it stood by its reporting and mentioned the lawsuit “is meritless and a transparent attempt to intimidate the Beast and silence the independent press.”
Superstar legal professional Mark Geragos is representing LaCivita within the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court docket in Richmond, Virginia. The submitting was first reported by Axios.
The case continues a development of aggressive motion taken towards the information media by Trump and people in his orbit. Trump has sued CBS Information for $20 billion over enhancing of a “60 Minutes” interview along with his 2024 opponent, Kamala Harris, and sued the Des Moines Register over an Iowa election ballot that turned out to be inaccurate. ABC Information settled a lawsuit with Trump over its incorrect declare that the president had been discovered civilly accountable for raping author E. Jean Carroll.
LaCivita, in his lawsuit, mentioned nearly all of the cash paid by Trump to him and his agency, Advancing Methods LLC, was to purchase media adverts. He alleges that the tales created a unfavourable notion for him and his agency and hindered the power to draw new shoppers.
In a letter to Geragos final month, the Day by day Beast mentioned it will request that Trump and several other of his aides be made accessible for the invention course of. The corporate’s lawyer, Neil Rosenhouse, disputed the concept LaCivita’s enterprise had been damage.
“The Beast’s reporting that the LLC earned millions of dollars by successfully managing President Trump’s campaign is not defamatory,” he wrote, “it is the opposite.”
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Comply with him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social