PEN turns the tables on the litigious president with a lawsuit to protect free speech
By the time The Hot Sheet publishes again, we’ll be on the other side of the midterm elections in the United States. In the tension-filled lead-up, the free-speech, human-rights-advocacy organization PEN America has filed a lawsuit against President Trump for challenging the free speech of writers.
The suit is most directly in response to the cease-and-desist actions by Trump’s attorneys against two books: Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Macmillan), which was published in January, and Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House (Simon & Schuster), which came out this summer.
Filed October 16 in the US District Court’s busy Southern District of New York, the suit claims that publishing-company intimidation translates into an effort to chill the press: “President Trump has directed his threats and retaliatory actions at specific outlets whose content and viewpoints he views as hostile,” reads the court complaint. “As a result, journalists who report on the president or his administration reasonably believe they face a credible threat of government retaliation for carrying out the duties of their profession. President Trump has thus intentionally hung a sword of Damocles over the heads of countless writers, journalists, and media entities, including members of Plaintiff PEN American Center, Inc. … His actions seek to accomplish indirectly what the president cannot do directly: impede professional and investigative journalism and silence criticism.”
But the court filing is restrained and demonstrates a noticeably precise, even surgical, request for court action. PEN asks for “a specific and narrow—but important—remedy for the president’s unconstitutional actions aimed at suppressing speech. It seeks the entry of an order (a) declaring that Defendant Trump’s retaliatory acts violate the First Amendment, and (b) enjoining Defendant Trump from directing any officer, employee, agency, or other agent or instrumentality of the United States government to take any action against any person or entity in retaliation for speech that the president or his administration do not like.”
CEO Suzanne Nossel and current president Jennifer Egan, in their presentation of the legal filing to the PEN America membership, say, “We have forcefully raised concerns about free expression infringements during the Obama, Bush, and other prior administrations, including, in some instances, by filing suit.” The author-journalist axis is hardly unknown territory for PEN: “Given our mission to defend free expression and support those who pay a price for its exercise, we are determined to rise in defense of the press freedom protections that are so fundamental to our society and democracy.”
Bottom line: This lawsuit asserts, in short, that publishers’ and authors’ rights to express themselves may not and must not be transgressed. The surprisingly readable full 26-page court filing includes an accounting of points that deserve consideration, from Trump’s conflation of Jeff Bezos’s personal ownership of The Washington Post and Amazon’s market performance to “credible threats of punishment by the government” for publishing activity disliked by the Oval Office. The time to speak up, as PEN demonstrates, is before things get out of hand.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
