World Liberty Financial has filed a defamation lawsuit against Justin Sun in Florida's Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court, seeking damages and a public retraction over what it calls false statements that harmed the project's reputation and token price. The suit, made public this week, escalates a legal war that began last month when Sun sued WLFI over frozen tokens.
What WLFI alleges
According to the complaint, Sun engaged in prohibited transfers, straw purchases, and short sales of WLFI tokens — actions that violate the Token Unlock Agreement and the project's blockchain documentation. More brazenly, WLFI says Sun threatened to “light World Liberty on fire” and collapse the $WLFI token price unless he was paid hundreds of millions of dollars. The company is asking the court to force Sun to retract those statements publicly and to award unspecified damages.
Sun's side of the story
Sun filed his own complaint on April 22, accusing WLFI of unauthorized token freezing, revoking his voting rights, and threatening to burn his holdings. He claims the relationship soured in mid-2025 after he declined to put more money into the project's USD1 stablecoin initiative. Sun's lawsuit paints WLFI as a project that turned on him after he stopped writing checks.
The Trump-Witkoff response
World Liberty Financial co-founders Eric Trump and Zack Witkoff dismissed Sun's earlier lawsuit as a “desperate attempt to deflect attention” from his alleged misconduct. In a statement, they accused Sun of trying to shake down the project and said the defamation suit would expose his tactics. The two legal battles now sit before the same Florida court, though no hearing dates have been set.
The case hinges on whether Sun's alleged threats and trades crossed into extortion or were simply aggressive negotiation. Both sides have offered sharply different timelines — WLFI says the trouble started when Sun violated the token agreement; Sun says it started when WLFI froze his stake without cause. A judge will have to sort through competing claims of bad faith.
