(Headline USA) Former President Donald Trump filed a $49 million lawsuit against investigative journalist Bob Woodward this week, accusing the author of inappropriately selling tapes of his interviews.
Trump claimed in the lawsuit that the interviews he agreed to with Woodward were only for the purpose of writing a book or a story. He did not give permission for their public release, the lawsuit states.
He is accusing Woodward, his publisher Simon & Schuster, and parent company Paramount Global of unfairly profiting off of the interviews and engaging in copyright infringement.
“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,” the lawsuit reads.
The complaint went on to accuse Woodward and Simon & Schuster of intentionally editing the audio files to tarnish Trump’s reputation.
“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 says.
Trump sat down for at least 19 interviews with Woodward between 2016 and 2020 when Woodward was writing his book, Rage. Last October, Simon & Schuster published the audio of the interviews, called “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 Truth Social after the tapes’ release.
