President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal was dismissed with prejudice by a federal judge in Miami on Saturday, Oct. 31. The case concerned the newspaper’s reporting on a letter allegedly sent by Trump for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. The dismissal prevents Trump from bringing the same claims against Murdoch and the newspaper again in federal court.
District Court Judge Darrin Gayles concluded that Trump’s amended complaint still did not plausibly allege that the Journal and the other defendants had acted with actual malice when publishing the story in July 2025. Gayles had dismissed the original complaint in April but permitted Trump to revise it to address the legal shortcomings identified in that decision.
In his 20-page ruling, Gayles described the newspaper’s work as a “thoughtful and detailed investigation.” He rejected allegations that its reporting was insufficient, that relevant information had been left out and that publication should have been stopped by denials from Trump and his representatives. The judge made no finding on whether Trump wrote the disputed letter, which the president has consistently denied authoring.
Gayles cited Supreme Court decisions requiring public figures pursuing defamation claims to establish actual malice. He also rejected the contention that Trump’s denial should have prevented publication, reasoning that such an approach would effectively give public figures the power to suppress unfavorable coverage and conflict with First Amendment protections for speech and the press.
The revised complaint included additional allegations about a telephone conversation between Trump and Murdoch. According to an earlier Newsweek report, Trump alleged that Murdoch told him, “I will handle it,” during a discussion about the planned article describing a birthday letter purportedly carrying Trump’s signature. Gayles rejected the arguments presented in the amended filing.
Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s publisher, welcomed the decision in a statement to CNBC. A spokesman for Trump’s legal team told CNBC that the president intended to appeal and would continue pursuing the defendants. The Journal is owned by Murdoch’s News Corp.
The Journal’s July 17, 2025, article reported that the letter appeared in an album assembled for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. It said Trump had provided it at the request of Epstein’s close friend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted two decades later of procuring underage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. The newspaper described typewritten lines inside a drawing of a naked woman, with a signature reading “Donald” beneath her waist. Trump called the letter fake and denied drawing pictures of women.
The ruling followed another development in Trump’s litigation against a media organization. On Oct. 22, a different federal judge in Miami ordered him to give a deposition by Dec. 11 in his separate $10 billion defamation case against the BBC.
