Former President Donald Trump lodged a $49 million lawsuit against investigative journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher Monday for selling tapes of his interviews.
Trump claims that he permitted the interviews to be recorded for the purposes of writing a book or a story, but did not give approval for their public release. He is accusing Woodward, his publisher Simon & Schuster, and parent company Paramount Global of unfairly profiting off of the audio and engaging in copyright infringement.
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“This case centers on Mr. Woodward’s systematic usurpation, manipulation, and exploitation of audio of President Trump gathered in connection with a series of interviews conducted by Mr. Woodward. Said audio was protected material, subject to various limitations on use and distribution,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a complaint.
Trump partook in at least 19 interviews with Woodward stretching from his 2016 campaign to a period between December 2019 and August 2020, when Woodward was working on his book Rage, which was released after the final interview. Last October, Simon & Schuster published an audiobook of those interviews, The Trump Tapes.
“As he fully understands, writer Bob Woodward never got my permission to release tapes of my various interviews with him. Those tapes were allowed only for purposes of making sure that he got my quotes & statements correct for ‘the WRITTEN WORD,’ in other words, for his, nevertheless, highly inaccurate book. The tapes are much better than the book,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform last year.
The complaint noted that Fear: Trump in the White House, a Woodward book that was released in 2018 before Rage in 2020, sold over 2 million copies and estimated the audiotapes could sell that much. The audiobooks for The Trump Tapes sell for $24.99. Trump’s lawyers multiplied those two numbers to arrive at their roughly $50 million request for damages.
In addition to publishing the tapes without his consent, Trump’s legal team is also accusing Woodward and his publisher of editing the files to tarnish the former president’s image.
“Far from being a ‘raw’ and unedited recording, it seems that extreme license was taken with the responses provided by President Trump in which he has a copyright interest, and the answers were manipulated to alter President Trump’s language as well as to support the particular narrative desired by Woodward, SSI, and Paramount,” the complaint added.
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The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. Woodward, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, previously defended the audiobooks, insisting the recordings were “done voluntarily” and “on the record.”
The Washington Examiner contacted Simon & Schuster for comment.
