A federal judge in New York on Friday dismissed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against journalist Bob Woodward regarding the ownership of interviews with the president published by the leading reporter.
In the last year of his first term in the Oval Office, Trump sat for over a dozen interviews with Woodward as the journalist wrote the 2020 book, Rage. Two years later, Woodward used audio recordings from the interviews as the basis for a second book, The Trump Tapes, leading the president to mount a $49 million lawsuit in 2023, alleging that he owned the copyright to 20 interviews and that they were recorded “for the sole purpose of Woodward being able to write a single book.”
However, U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe of the Southern District of New York dismissed Trump’s arguments that he is a joint author of the tapes, writing that federal copyright law preempts state law claims when it comes to Woodward’s right to use the information.
“There is almost no support in the case law for the notion that an interviewee has a copyright interest in his responses to interview questions, and such a conclusion would run counter to animating principles of the Copyright Act,” the judge wrote.
Trump’s legal team, which has one month to amend the complaint a third time, slammed the ruling in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“In another biased action by a New York Court, this wrongful decision was issued without even affording President Trump the basic due process of a hearing,” a spokesman said. “We will continue to ensure that those who commit wrongdoing against President Trump and all Americans are held accountable.”
The lawsuit has dragged out for years after Trump first sued Woodward in January 2023, saying he told the journalist that the interviews were meant solely for the 2020 book. Woodward has denied those claims, saying he never agreed to the restrictions.
The Trump Tapes contained 19 interviews Woodward conducted with Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago between December 2019 and August 2020, as well as one interview he did with the president in 2016.
Woodward is known as a deep Trump skeptic, painting unflattering portraits of the president in multiple books, including his most recent one, War, which came out as the president was running for reelection last year.
TRUMP CAMPAIGN CALLS BOB WOODWARD A ‘DERANGED MAN’ AHEAD OF NEW BOOK
At the time, the Trump campaign labeled the book as “the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
“Woodward is an angry, little man and is clearly upset because President Trump is successfully suing him because of the unauthorized publishing of recordings he made previously. President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue. Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality,” a spokesman continued.
