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Summary: USA Today analyzed Donald Trump’s bloated history of litigation.
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you. If that’s the case, why does Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump threaten to sue so many people who talk badly about him? That was a question that USA Today set out to answer recently.
USA Today analyzed Trump’s lawsuit history, and the publication stated that he has either filed or been sued 4,000 times. After an analysis, it stated “that he rarely follows through with lawsuits over people’s words. He has won only one such case, and the ultimate disposition of that is in dispute.”
Many states have adopted Anti-SLAPP laws, which are aimed to protect people from lawsuits aimed to stop freedom of speech. Despite these protections, USA Today said that Trump’s method of silencing his haters is “effective.” He has threatened to sue critics from all walks of life—documentary filmmakers, the Better Business Bureau, newspapers, Bill Maher, and Miss Pennsylvania amongst others. Shark Tank star and real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran described in her memoir how Trump sued her for comments she made about him to the media, and ultimately she won because she proved she said nothing different than what he said about himself publicly.
Maher said that Trump bullies others by threatening expensive and time-consuming litigation, even if the other party had done nothing wrong.
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“Plainly, the guy uses lawsuits as a tool of intimidation and doesn’t care how much he clogs the courts with nonsense,” Maher said
The Trump Organization’s general counsel is Alan Garten. He said that because Trump as a man is entwined with his business brand, it is important for the mogul to do anything to protect his name from attacks.
Garten said that they do not actually file a lot of defamation lawsuits.
“We’ve been very effective in using cease-and-desist letters,” Garten said.
Trump stated that if he were president he would change libel laws to make it easier to sue. While the feasibility of his claim is on par with asking Mexico to build a wall, his idea has bothered media analysts, according to USA Today.
“We have a system that worked remarkably well to foster debate and discourse over 50 years. I think we tinker with that at our peril,” Gene Policinski, senior vice president of the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center in Washington, DC., said.
What do you think of Donald Trump’s litigious history? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: USA Today
Photo courtesy of BGR
