A friend of mine owns a restaurant, and one of their employees was responsible for managing the website and domain.

Unfortunately, the employee forgot to renew the domain, and it expired. Someone else has since registered it. i guess it was on autobuy as it was gone the same day. On Godaddy.

The new owner kept a copy of the restaurant's original website, including its branding and content, but added gambling links throughout the site.

The website still looks like it belongs to the restaurant, which could mislead customers and potentially damage the business's reputation.

Is there a way to recover the domain or force the new owner to remove the restaurant's content?

Has anyone dealt with something similar? Any advice would be appreciated

GoDaddy's customer support is the worst. I have worked in customer support for various software firms for almost thirty years and I know what customer support should be. GoDaddy's attitude towards their customers can be summed as 'get lost.'
I have been unable for several days to log in to GoDaddy. I waited, thinking it would clear up but it didn't, so I finally contacted customer support. Customer support turned out to be an AI bot that said the problem was my browser (Chrome) and suggested several workarounds that didn't work. When I finally got in touch with a human he put me on hold for 30 minutes and then hung up. I called back and was put on hold for so long when someone finally answered, I'd forgotten what I was calling about so I just said I wanted to close my account. He gave me a different number to call and when I called that there was no answer. I'm disgusted.
GoDaddy may be alright if you're highly technical and don't need assistance, but it's a very hard system to use and there are many bugs which they refuse to fix. It's also very expensive compared to alternatives. The smartest thing to do is to stay as far away from GoDaddy as possible.