A federal judge in Miami on Monday dismissed President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal’s publisher over the newspaper’s reporting that Trump contributed a drawing of a naked woman as part of a 2003 birthday gift for financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The lawsuit — which had sought $10 billion in damages — named as defendants the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones; its parent company, News Corp.; and chief executive Robert Thomson, along with majority owner Rupert Murdoch, plus reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo.
U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles found that the president — who sued in his personal capacity — had not met the burden of showing that the newspaper acted with actual malice, a legal standard established in the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan case in 1964. Under this standard, Trump would need to show that the Journal published false information, knew it was false and acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
“The Complaint comes nowhere close to this standard,” the judge wrote in his opinion. “Quite the opposite.”
The lawsuit centers on a letter with a signature that appears to be Trump’s, which The Washington Post has not independently verified, published by the Journal in July. The document includes several lines of text that formed the outline of a naked woman and includes a message to Epstein: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump had a long-standing friendship with Epstein, and the two had a falling-out in the mid-2000s.
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to two charges of soliciting prostitution, including one involving a minor. He was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019 and died in federal custody later that year. His death was ruled a suicide. Judges and lawmakers say that over decades, he abused, trafficked and molested scores of girls, many of whom have come forward in court and in other public forums.
Gayles granted the Journal’s motion without prejudice, leaving open the possibility of a refiled lawsuit. Trump’s team can submit an amended complaint by April 27, the judge said.
A Trump legal spokesman said in a statement that the president plans to pursue the case.
“President Trump will follow Judge Gayles’s ruling and guidance to refile this powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other Defendants,” the spokesman said. “The President will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People.”
The Wall Street Journal did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Trump, who has long railed against the news media as the “enemy of the people,” has sued several media outlets during his second term in office, including the New York Times and the BBC (those suits are ongoing), and CBS and ABC (those suits were settled).
When he sued the Journal in July, he posted on Truth Social that the article was “fake news” and that the newspaper is “useless.”
“We have just filed a POWERHOUSE Lawsuit against everyone involved in publishing the false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS ‘article’ in the useless ‘rag’ that is, The Wall Street Journal,” Trump wrote at the time. A spokesperson for the Journal said the paper would “vigorously defend” itself against the lawsuit. “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting,” they wrote at the time.
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