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A pattern of legal threats This is only the most recent incident in which Justin Sun has used legal threats to try to shape media narratives around himself and his companies. Journalist Ryan Mac has said that Sun threatened to sue him in 2018 after he published a story at BuzzFeed News noting that Justin Sun’s Tron project had been accused of plagiarizing sections of its whitepaper from one published by Filecoin. (Sun blamed the duplications and lack of citations on translation issues.)1617 In 2023, Tron sent a retraction demand to crypto publication CoinGeek over a post that noted “Justin Sun’s Tron blockchain is once again being flagged as terror groups’ go-to financing option”.d That portion of the CoinGeek post was based on a Wall Street Journal report that Hamas-linked money exchanges were “overwhelmingly” using the Tether stablecoin on the Tron blockchain.2 Other statements in the CoinGeek piece challenged by Tron were direct quotes from a letter sent by the Campaign for Accountability ethics watchdog group to the Senate Banking Committee.18 It’s not clear if Tron also demanded a takedown from the Journal or any other outlets that quoted the Journal’s reporting. Neither CoinGeek nor the Journal issued a retraction, and it doesn’t appear that Tron followed through on the threats against CoinGeek by filing a lawsuit.

In late 2024, Justin Sun and his team demanded crypto media outlet CoinDesk take down an article about Sun’s $6.2 million purchase of Comedian, a conceptual artwork appearing as a banana duct taped to a wall. Shortly after Sun purchased the artwork, he captured additional headlines by eating the banana at a press conference in Hong Kong.e According to the Wall Street Journal, Sun’s team had objected to the “tone” of the CoinDesk article, which described Sun’s desire for fame, then-ongoing SEC lawsuit, and legal threats against media outlets, and suggested that his headline-making art purchase could be an attempt to distract media attention from less flattering coverage. (As I noted in a past issue of Citation Needed, “The [banana] stunt was timed right around Sun's first WLFI token purchase, diverting some press attention from it.”) CoinDesk had just been acquired by the crypto exchange Bullish, and Bullish executives reportedly were the ones who ordered the article’s deletion. According to some CoinDesk employees, Bullish executives had been pressuring reporters to avoid critical coverage or negative opinion pieces about important sponsors of CoinDesk’s annual Consensus conference, a major income stream for the struggling media outlet; Sun’s Tron was among them. Not long after the article was removed, CoinDesk fired its editor-in-chief Kevin Reynolds and deputy editors-in-chief Nick Baker and Mark Hochstein. CoinDesk said the firings were part of a downsizing effort and unre