Charles Harder is in a combative mood. Hollywood’s top entertainment lawyer, fresh from a $140m lawsuit against Gawker on behalf of Hulk Hogan, is representing Melania Trump, potential first lady of the United States, in a $150m lawsuit against the UK’s Daily Mail, just months before the presidential election.

“The Daily Mail inflicted massive damages upon Mrs Trump’s reputation, and their retraction was half-hearted,” Harder tells the Guardian from his base in Los Angeles.

Harder was hired by Trump in September to take on the Mail and others for reporting “100% false” rumours that the former model had worked as an escort in the 1990s. But while the suit elicited a rare retraction and apology from the paper, Harder has not been swayed and will be pursuing litigation.



Melania Trump sues the Daily Mail for $150m over 'lies' about her past Read more

“[The Mail’s apology] came several weeks after they had published their original article, knowing that it was going to be republished by lots of different publications, and it was republished,” he says. “Then we had to do what we could do to get retractions across the board, but still, there were hundreds and hundreds of publications that ended up reporting about this horrible lie that the Daily Mail had perpetuated. The damage had been done.”

The only reason the Mail published a retraction, Harder maintains, was to try to minimise damages that it could be held responsible for, “but I think the end result will be they will be held accountable for all of the damages that they caused”. There is little chance of any developments in the Trump case before the presidential election, but a court in Maryland, where the lawsuit was filed, has scheduled a status conference in December.

Harder, 46, grew up in Encino, Los Angeles, where his father was a financial consultant and his mother a homemaker. He attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he became involved in student politics, and later enrolled in law school at Loyola. “I grew out of politics and when I was in law school, I needed a job after I finished to pay off all my student loans, which were massive,” he says.

He went on to work for a series of firms before starting his own, and made a name for himself representing high-profile clients such as Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, George Clooney, and Clint Eastwood, mainly in disputes involving advertising. In essence, Harder kept the stars’ names off products they had not officially endorsed, such as jewellery, movie projectors and even ottomans.

His battle with what he terms the “irresponsible” press dates back to 1999, but it was in 2012 when his name began circulating in popular news stories. In that year, Harder was hired by writer and actor Lena Dunham, at the height of her success with the HBO series Girls, to demand that Gawker take down a $3.7m book proposal which the website had acquired and published without her permission – Gawker eventually obliged.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles Harder with Hulk Hogan during the case against Gawker. Photograph: Gerardo Mora/Getty Images

Around the same time, Gawker posted a clip from the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan’s sex tape. Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, hired personal lawyer David Houston to ask Gawker to remove the video, and when the publisher refused, citing first amendment rights, Houston asked Harder to file a lawsuit against Gawker and its founder, Nick Denton, for invasion of privacy. In March, a Florida jury made shockwaves by awarding Bollea $140m – $40m more than Harder had originally requested – and soon thereafter, Gawker, once a leader in digital media, filed for bankruptcy. Gawker.com was soon shut down by its new owner, Univision.



The case wasn’t entirely black and white, and controversy abounded when it emerged that Bollea’s lawsuit was actually funded by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and co-founder of PayPal, who had had his own issues with Gawker in the past after the site published an article about his sexuality. Press freedom advocates feared that the verdict would pave the way for other rich and powerful people to pursue personal vendettas by giving financial backing to chosen litigants in order to take down those who had wronged them. It is not a fear Harder shares.

“It was a meritorious case,” he says. “If my firm had taken on the case on a contingency fee basis, if a public interest organisation had taken on the case, if the client had paid for the case himself, or if he had gotten funding from an outside litigation funding company, he would still have gotten the verdict that he got. Mr Thiel just happened to pay Hulk Hogan’s costs, but that doesn’t take away from the merits of the case. Gawker had violated his privacy, violated the law, and a jury ruled in his favour. That’s why the case ended up the way that it did.”

Since the Hogan verdict, Harder’s list of influential clients has been growing. He was hired by Amber Heard to sue the comedian Doug Stanhope after he wrote online that the actress was blackmailing her estranged husband Johnny Depp, whom she had accused of spousal abuse. He was hired by the former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to challenge negative media coverage in New York magazine over sexual harassment allegations against him by his former colleagues, a partnership that led to one Forbes writer dubbing Harder “the rich man’s favourite tool for assaulting journalism”.

But perhaps his most intriguing relationship is the one he has with the Trumps.



It is somewhat unusual for a major party’s presidential nominee or their spouse to mount legal action against a publication so close to an election, but Trump has a reputation for threatening and pursuing legal action. The GOP candidate, who has banned publications such as the Washington Post, Politico and a Guardian reporter and photographer from covering some of his events, recently tweeted that his lawyers wanted him to sue the New York Times for “irresponsible intent” in reports. While Trump never specifically mentioned Harder, some have speculated as to whether the lawyer will be acting as his right-hand man.

When I put this to Harder, he laughs and firmly states: “No, I’m not one of Trump’s lawyers, period. I don’t represent Donald Trump, I represent his wife; it’s different.”

Nonetheless, does he agree with Trump that the hurdle established in the landmark supreme court decision in New York Times v Sullivan (1964), which requires public figures who bring defamation lawsuits against the media to establish “actual malice”, should be challenged?

“Separate and apart from anything that Donald Trump has ever said, I’ve always felt that the ‘actual malice’ standard is unreasonable,” Harder says. “Justice Byron White, who voted in favour of the standard in the New York Times v Sullivan case, 20 years later wrote a dissent in the Dun & Bradstreet case, saying we all got it wrong, that the standard is far too high and it’s very difficult for people who are public figures to prevail when they are actually defamed. I agree with him.”

As far as public figures go, does Harder think there is a difference between suits that come from celebrities and those that come from politicians, due to varying levels of public interest, and if so, should the term “public figures” be split into two?

“I do think that in the context of a political campaign, if a reporter is writing about issues that are relevant to the political campaign, there is some leeway there and there should be some leeway there,” he says. “If you’re electing a Congress member, a senator, a governor, a president, or any other person to elective office, that is different from just the public’s curiosity about somebody’s sex life, somebody who is not seeking public office, who just happens to be an actor or a recording artist. I do think that those two have a different public importance.

“But my view is this: if it’s defamation, it’s problematic, inherently. The actual malice standard basically says, ‘OK, you do have defamation but there’s an additional standard that needs to be overcome if you’re a public figure.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Denton, founder of Gawker, clashed with Terry Bollea, AKA Hulk Hogan, before the site declared bankruptcy. Photograph: Pool/Reuters

Though he views libel laws as outdated, Harder has never seen himself as an adversary of the free press and disagrees with depictions of him as such.

“It’s not true,” he says. “I’m an advocate of responsible free press, but when people choose to tell lies about others, they’re exposing themselves. Sometimes when people lie and lie, they become emboldened that they can get away with anything, and then they tell bigger and bigger lies against various people, some of whom can afford to bring an action. The takeaway is that news organisations need to be responsible, just like lawyers, doctors, and teachers.”

A spokesman for the Daily Mail said the newspaper had “offered Mr Harder the opportunity to agree wording for the retraction days – not several weeks – after publication” and that “instead of taking that opportunity, he rushed to file a lawsuit later the same day”.

He added: “Mr Harder’s many public statements about the lawsuit have attracted vast amounts of media coverage, far more than the original article, which provoked very little response. The Daily Mail disagrees with Mr Harder’s interpretation of the article as the retraction makes clear ... we note that, six weeks later, proceedings have still not been served by him in the US.”

Harder, meanwhile, says the recent increase in his profile hasn’t changed his life much. “I’ve always been busy, I’ve always been hardworking, and that remains. I’ve got the same family, same house, same car, same routine.” He spends his spare time with his wife and children, mostly going to places around LA and doing things together. “It’s a pretty boring life,” he says, “but I enjoy it.”