Nearly 45 years after going bankrupt, the Washington Star is suing NOTUS as the latter news outlet rebrands to the Star soon.
The reborn Washington, D.C., newspaper filed the federal lawsuit on Thursday in Virginia over trademark infringement of its name. The trademark is owned by New York Sun publisher Dovid Efune, who announced he is reviving the “legendary” newspaper.
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“More than four decades later, we’re scaling back up the Star’s daily publication,” he wrote in an editorial on Substack. “It’s been some years in the making. We’ve long been of the view that our nation’s capital has been poorer without the Star’s distinctive voice.”
In August 1981, the Washington Star ceased operations and filed for bankruptcy after solidifying its conservative reputation in the nation’s capital for 128 years. Efune described the daily afternoon newspaper as the “most prominent and fiercest rival of the Washington Post” back in the day.
Efune now sees an opportunity to compete with the Washington Post, which laid off roughly one-third of its staff in February.
Both the Washington Star and NOTUS are trying to fill the void left by the left-leaning newspaper, but the two companies will be partly preoccupied with a legal battle over the Star trademark.
“Defendant’s planned use of ‘The Star’ as a trademark and trade name for a news publication based in the Washington, D.C., area is confusingly similar to Plaintiff’s registered Mark, THE WASHINGTON STAR, and is, on its face, likely to cause confusion, mistake, or deception among consumers,” the 19-page complaint states.
The plaintiff is seeking a preliminary and permanent injunction prohibiting the defendant from “using ‘The Star’ or any confusingly similar mark,” as well as any compensatory damages and a jury trial to hear the case.
Efune is going head-to-head with NOTUS publisher and Politico co-founder Robert Allbritton, who launched NOTUS in January 2024 through the journalism nonprofit organization named after himself. Notably, Allbritton’s father owned the Washington Star from 1975 to 1978.
“The Allbritton family’s close connection with the former Washington Star makes NOTUS’s adoption of ‘The Star’ for a Washington-area news operation all the more likely to cause confusion with Plaintiff’s Mark,” the lawsuit says.
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Allbritton told the New York Times this week he isn’t worried about confusing readers with the new name.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last month, Allbritton said he considered renaming NOTUS to the Washington Star but stuck with the Star instead. Unless the Virginia district court decides otherwise, NOTUS is officially rebranding itself as the Star next week.
