Trump Organization Won't Sue Over Times Story About His Gross Behavior With Women After All 

By Anna Merlan  |  May 17, 2016 | 1:45pm
Politics

Donald Trump, a horsehair mattress stuffed with molding copies of Hustler, is deeply upset by a New York Times story suggesting he can be sexist and somewhat creepy in his private dealings with women. After petulantly tweeting about the story for a while, then calling CNN to yell about it, he moved on to the part where he pretends like he’s going to sue, although his lawyers almost immediately walked that threat back.

The Times’ story was, shall we say, not exactly a shocker, depicting a range of interactions from casually sexist to overtly sexist. But Trump has gone into full freakout, launching many aggrieved tweets in the Times’ direction:

The Times story was written by Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey, one of whom is a woman. Trump’s tweets suggest that a man did the whole thing.

No symbolism there, no sir.

Trump’s ex-girlfriend Rowanne Brewer Lane, also told Fox & Friends Monday that she didn’t find Trump’s behavior demeaning, a statement which I’m sure Trump did not solicit from her or anything. Trump called the control room of CNN’s New Day to make sure they’d seen it.

And now that all of that hasn’t worked to take the wind out of the story’s sails, a Trump Organization attorney named Jill Martin told CNN’s Erin Burnett that a lawsuit was “a distinct possibility.” She added, “I haven’t talked to him about it personally, but, you know, when he’s attacked like that and things are said falsely, he definitely fires back.”

Yeah, but most of that “firing back” tends to happen on Twitter, where concepts like being under oath don’t apply. By late Monday night, Trump had moved on to attacking the women quoted in the story directly.

Meanwhile, a different Trump lawyer, Michael Cohen, told CNN that he understands there’s a “high bar” for suing media organizations:

“It’s a very high bar,” Cohen said. “I don’t think that this is going to end up in litigation. The truth is that The New York Times owes both Ms. Brewer and they owe Donald Trump an apology.”
Cohen added, “They need to do a retraction and they need to actually be fair, because they’re destroying their paper.”

Seems unlikely, but worth a shot!

This post was updated one minute after publication, and its headline changed, to reflect that different Trump Organization lawyers have different ideas about whether or not anybody’s getting sued here.

Photo via AP

 
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