MAGA donor hits Guilfoyle, attorneys with defamation lawsuit

Eric Deters, the donor to President Trump whom former U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle reportedly asked to wire $100,000 to her American Express account, leading to her ousting from the Trump administration, sued her and her lawyers for defamation.

Deters filed the lawsuit against Guilfoyle and defense attorneys Jesse Binnal and David M. Schwartz in Kenton Circuit Court in Kentucky. He called for them to be charged on one count of defamation, one count of false light invasion of privacy and one additional count against Guilfoyle for breach of contract.

The donor requested damages and a trial by jury.

Deters wrote in the suit that he was notified by the Wall Street Journal’s Dana Mattioli that the ambassador and her legal team told Mattioli that the text exchanges were “false” and that Deters was a “known blackmailer.”

“The texts are not fake. I have never been accused of or charged with blackmail … This statement contains the falsehood that I owed Kim Guilfoyle money,” he wrote.

Mattioli was one of the reporters to publish the Journal’s story about Guilfoyle and the texts to Deters last week.

Guilfoyle denied allegations that she asked Deters to pay off a credit card bill. However, she was asked to resign on Tuesday. New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia started her first press briefing sharing that the Trump administration asked Guilfoyle to resign.

She said after she resigned that she would “not allow false accusations to define my decades of public service,” noting that she would “vigorously” defend herself.

Deters warned Monday on CNN that he planned to sue , telling Anderson Cooper that it’s “going to be fun.”

“They first said that the text messages were fake –– defamation,” Deters told Cooper. “Then they said I was a known blackmailer. I’ve never blackmailed anybody in my life.”

He had told the Journal that he paid Guilfoyle $300,000 over several years to speak at Freedom Fest, a conservative Kentucky-based event he launched in 2020 in opposition to COVID-19 mandates. Deters told Cooper that the diplomat never mentioned an outstanding debt in their text exchanges.

“Now, they’re claiming that there are invoices when she knows that’s not true. In all the text messages, she doesn’t mention anything about me owing money,” he said. “She knows that is phony, and I’m going to be suing them all for defamation.”

Text messages obtained by NewsNation , The Hill’s broadcast partner, showed Guilfoyle appearing to plead to Deters not to share any details about their “arrangement” and warned him he could “literally cost me my ambassadorship.”

Trump said he did not “like what we were reading” when asked about Guilfoyle’s ousting on Tuesday.

The incident was a stunning rebuke of a high-profile Trump ally who was previously engaged with the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., before the two broke off the engagement in 2024.

“She wasn’t a member of my family,” the president told reporters. I guess she dated my son a long time ago. She was doing a good job, but we didn’t like what we were reading.”