A federal judge in Miami on Saturday dismissed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over reporting about his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot refile the lawsuit.
Gayles found that the president’s amended complaint did not adequately allege that the defendants had acted with actual malice, the legal standard required in defamation cases involving public figures. The judge described Trump as “grasping at straws” and said the lawsuit sought to manufacture shortcomings in the Journal’s investigative work.
The dispute concerned a report published last year about a sexually suggestive letter and drawing that, according to the Journal, carried Trump’s name. The newspaper reported that the material appeared in an album assembled for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. Ghislaine Maxwell reportedly collected the letter for the album, years before Epstein’s first arrest in 2006 and his subsequent falling-out with Trump.
According to the newspaper’s account, the letter’s text sat inside an outline resembling a hand-drawn naked woman and concluded with a birthday greeting referring to shared secrecy. Trump denied being its author and described the report as “false, malicious, and defamatory.” His lawsuit accused the newspaper and its reporters of knowingly and recklessly publishing false and damaging statements that caused him substantial financial and reputational harm.
The decision followed an earlier dismissal in April, when Gayles found that Trump had not sufficiently argued that the reporting met the actual malice standard. The judge allowed him to revise his case, and Trump submitted an amended complaint in May. In Saturday’s ruling, Gayles said the revised allegations remained vague, conclusory and, in some instances, inconsistent with the article itself.
Gayles cited New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision requiring public figures to establish that a publisher knew a statement was false or recklessly disregarded the truth. He also noted that the Journal had presented Trump’s denial to readers, including his assertion that the letter was fake, rather than ignoring or downplaying his response. Other allegations in the complaint also lacked merit, the judge said.
The dismissal comes amid Trump’s broader legal conflicts with news organizations during his second term, including cases involving the BBC and The Associated Press. CNN, MS NOW and Politico are suing to regain access after Trump barred them from the White House in mid-September. Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
