Former President Donald Trump speaks on May 28, 2022 in Casper, Wyoming. A rally is being held in Wyoming to support Harriet Hegeman, the primary challenger to Rep. Liz Cheney.
Chet Strange | Getty Images
former President Donald Trump Trump sued noted journalist Bob Woodward on Monday over the release of audio recordings of his interviews with Trump, who claims he never agreed to allow those tapes to be sold to the public.
Woodward, publisher Simon & Schuster and its parent company, Paramount Global, published an audiobook featuring hours of “raw” audio from “unlawfully usurped” copyright interests and other rights of Trump. Woodward’s many interviews With Trump, Sue alleges.
The suit seeks $50 million or more, based on estimates that the audiobook, “The Trump Tapes,” sold more than 2 million copies at a price of $24.99.
The 31-page complaint, filed in federal court in Pensacola, Florida, alleges that Trump “repeatedly told Woodward, in the presence of others, that he would be able to write the same book for the sole purpose of Woodward”. were agreeing.”
That book, 2021’s “Rage,” failed to replicate the success of Woodward’s previous book on the Trump White House, according to the lawsuit. Woodward then “decided to exploit, usurp and capitalize on the voice of President Trump by releasing interview sound recordings of his interviews with President Trump in audiobook form,” the complaint alleges.
Simon & Schuster did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit, Woodward interviewed Trump by phone and in person 19 times between December 2019 and August 2020. The lawsuit says Woodward and his publisher assembled more than eight hours of audio from those interviews, plus another from 2016, for the audiobook, which was released last October “without President Trump’s permission.”
According to the lawsuit, Trump “made Woodward aware on several occasions, on and off the record, of the nature of the limited license to any recordings, therefore retaining all other rights to the commercial and narration for himself.”
The complaint also alleges that Trump and his attorneys had “confronted” the defendants before about the dispute, but they “refused to recognize President Trump’s copyright and contractual rights.”
The lawsuit states that the audio has also been reworked into CD, paperback and e-book formats, “all at President Trump’s expense and without his account.”
The suit accused three defendants of unjust enrichment, and singled out the author himself for breach of a contract and “an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing”.
Trump sued Woodward, one half of the veteran reporting duo that broke the Nixon-era Watergate scandal, as he ramped up his 2024 presidential campaign. A federal judge, weeks before launching his current White House bid Trump’s huge lawsuit dismissed The Democratic presidential campaign against rival Hillary Clinton and a cadre of former executives, slogan it as a “political manifesto”.