The co-manager of President Donald Trump’s profitable 2024 marketing campaign sued the Every 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 net 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 Every 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 in opposition to the information media by Trump and people in his orbit. Trump has sued CBS Information for $20 billion over modifying 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 the vast majority of the cash paid by Trump to him and his agency, Advancing Methods LLC, was to purchase media advertisements. He alleges that the tales created a adverse notion for him and his agency and hindered the flexibility to draw new purchasers.
In a letter to Geragos final month, the Every day Beast mentioned it might request that Trump and a number of other of his aides be made obtainable for the invention course of. The corporate’s lawyer, Neil Rosenhouse, disputed the concept LaCivita’s enterprise had been harm.
“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. Observe him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social
