President Trump’s multimillion-dollar defamation case against The Wall Street Journal was dismissed with prejudice on Saturday, October 31, after a federal judge found that the president had not established that the defendants acted with actual malice. The dispute centered on reporting about a birthday album prepared for Jeffrey Epstein.
U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles issued the decision in a 20-page ruling in Miami. He described the lawsuit as “grasping at straws” and said it sought to “manufacture” shortcomings in the Journal’s investigative work. Dismissal with prejudice means the case cannot be refiled.
The actual malice standard requires public figures pursuing defamation claims to show that the statements at issue were published with knowledge that they were false or with disregard for whether they were true. Gayles concluded that Trump’s case did not meet that requirement.
The Journal article, published last year, described a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper reported bore Trump’s name. According to the report, the letter appeared in an album assembled in 2003 to mark Epstein’s 50th birthday. Trump rejected the newspaper’s account, calling the story “FAKE.”
The president brought the lawsuit against the Journal, its parent company News Corp, the company’s chief executive and the reporters responsible for the article. Rupert Murdoch, News Corp’s chairman emeritus, was also named as a defendant in the case over the newspaper’s reporting.
House lawmakers later subpoenaed the birthday book from Epstein’s estate. A redacted version of the book became part of the dispute over the letter. Karoline Leavitt, who was then White House press secretary, denied that Trump had drawn the picture or signed it.
The Saturday decision followed an earlier ruling by Gayles in April that found Trump’s lawyers had failed to meet the legal threshold for their claim. At that point, the judge said the president had come “nowhere close” to demonstrating actual malice by the newspaper. Trump’s legal team subsequently refiled the suit.
Despite the latest dismissal, a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told CBS News that the president would continue pursuing the case against the Journal and the other defendants. A source familiar with the team’s legal strategy said an appeal was likely.
