A U.S. federal judge permanently dismissed a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Donald Trump against The Wall Street Journal, its parent company News Corp, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and reporters over a report concerning a sexually suggestive letter linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
The lawsuit stemmed from a WSJ report detailing a 2003 birthday album compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday, which featured a note and drawing allegedly bearing Trump’s name.
Trump strongly denied writing or signing the letter, dismissing the article as fake, and initially sought up to $20 billion (later adjusted) in damages.
U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that Trump’s legal team failed to clear the high legal bar required for defamation suits brought by public figures.
The judge concluded that the plaintiff failed to establish that the newspaper acted with “actual malice”—meaning they knowingly published false information or showed reckless disregard for the truth.
Dismissed “With Prejudice”:
Because this was Trump’s refiled and amended complaint (following an initial dismissal earlier in the year), Judge Gayles threw out the case “with prejudice,” which legally bars Trump from refiling or amending the lawsuit on this matter.
Sources close to Trump’s legal strategy indicated that the decision is expected to be appealed.
Judge Darrin Gayles threw out the case, finding the suit runs counter to the First Amendment, which protects freedom of the press.
Gayles had already once dismissed the defamation lawsuit, which sought $20 billion in damages. Trump’s team refiled the suit seeking $10 billion, and this time, the judge threw out the case “with prejudice,” meaning the suit cannot be filed again.
The news outlet’s story about Epstein’s 50th birthday book-and the letter with Trump’s name-came as the Trump administration battled intense bipartisan criticism over the summer for its handling of Epstein documents.
Trump had said the newspaper had slandered him and violated libel laws in publishing the article.
In his 20-page ruling, Gayles noted the paper’s “thoughtful and detailed investigation” that led to the story and said the lawsuit was “grasping at straws” to “to manufacture flaws” their work.
Trump’s legal team had argued that because Trump denied writing the letter when contacted by the Journal, the paper should have “disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story”, Gayles wrote.
“But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment,” Gayles wrote.
If that were the law, he wrote, then “any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press—a result that flies in the face of the ‘American privilege to speak one’s mind'”.
According to the Wall Street Journal story, a letter bearing Trump’s name “contained several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker”.
Trump alleged that the letter obtained and released by the Journal, which features his signature at the bottom, was “fake” and that the defendants devised the story in order to defame him.
