On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel filed a lawsuit against The Atlantic seeking $250 million in damages for an article the magazine published last week about Patel’s alleged drinking habits. The lawsuit claims that the publication had “crossed the legal line by publishing an article replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s reputation and drive him from office.”
The piece, written by Sarah Fitzpatrick, claimed that “Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government.” It reported that six current and former officials said that early in Patel’s tenure, “meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights.” It also claimed that, “on multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated,” according to Justice Department and White House Officials.
Patel’s lawsuit alleges that the defendants published the piece “with actual malice, despite being expressly warned, hours before publication, that the central allegations were categorically false; despite having abundant publicly available information contradicting those allegations; despite obvious and fatal defects in their own sourcing.” The lawsuit also claims Fitzpatrick relied on “anonymous sources she knew to be both highly partisan with an ax to grind and also not in a position to know the facts.”
The suit claims that The Atlantic‘s “conduct toward Director Patel is part of a broader and well-documented pattern. Numerous Atlantic pieces over the past two years have characterized Director Patel as unqualified, dangerous, corrupt, or mentally unstable.”
Although the bar for proving defamation of a public official is high, Patel has been awarded damages for defamation before. In 2023, Patel sued Substack writer Jim Stewartson for libel, alleging Stewartson had spread “pernicious lies about Mr. Patel, including accusing him of committing sedition, helping to plan illegal riots on January 6, working to overthrow the government, paying people to lie to Congress, and being an agent of Russia.” The lawsuit also alleged that Stewartson had made statements that damaged the reputation of Patel’s non-profit, the Kash Foundation.
In 2025, a federal judge granted Patel’s motion for a default judgment. Although the judge wrote that Patel’s reputation was not “significantly sullied” by the defamatory statements, he still found that “Stewartson’s statements were defamatory and caused presumed damages.” He then awarded Patel and his foundation $250,000 in punitive and compensatory damages against Stewartson. Stewartson told CNBC he was “never served with this lawsuit” and he planned to pursue his “own case against them for their years-long campaign of abuse of me and the legal system.”
The Atlantic released a statement calling Patel’s lawsuit “meritless,” and it vowed to “vigorously defend” its journalists against the litigation.
Patel is not the only member of the Trump administration who has sued the press for defamation. Notably, Trump himself has sued several outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Des Moines Register, and CNN. Most recently, Trump sued the BBC for allegedly distorting his remarks on January 6 in a documentary, and he is seeking up to $10 billion in damages.
