Former President Donald Trump has made good on his threat to sue Bob Woodward over the Washington Post journalist’s latest book, accusing him of releasing audio recordings of their interviews without his consent and seeking nearly $50 million in damages.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in the Northern District of Florida, also names publisher Simon & Schuster and its parent company, Paramount Global, as defendants. It accuses Woodward of the “systematic usurpation, manipulation, and exploitation of audio” in violation of Trump’s contractual rights and copyright interests.
At issue is the audiobook The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump, which was published in October 2022 and consists of recordings of more than a dozen interviews the two had done during Trump’s final year in office.
Trump alleges that when Rage failed to reach the same level of commercial success as Fear, Woodward’s 2018 book focused on the Trump White House, the journalist, and publisher “conspired to, and did, collate and cobble together more than eight hours of ‘raw’ interviews” and released them in audiobook format “without President Trump’s permission.”
via joemiller