A federal judge has thrown out President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over the paper’s 2025 report about the president’s bawdy birthday note to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump’s lawsuit, which listed Fox News chair and Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch among the defendants, was dismissed with prejudice on Saturday by U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles, a Miami-based appointee of former President Barack Obama.
The letter, published in a bombshell report by the Journal last summer, included a racy poem written in the third person with Trump’s signature in the bottom, written on the occasion of Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2023. The text was outlined in sharpie with a drawing of a naked woman. The president immediately denied he’d written the letter, and sued the WSJ for billions.
The Journal has stood by its reporting. Dow Jones, which owns the publication, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gayles found that Trump’s attorneys had failed to credibly allege “actual malice” — that the paper had recklessly or knowingly published false information — a standard used to determine if a public figure has been defamed.
“The allegations regarding malice are conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the Article, and often irrelevant to whether Defendants knew or should have known that the statements in the Article were purportedly false,” he wrote.
This is the second time Gayles has dismissed a lawsuit from the president over the Journal’s Epstein report. He tossed Trump’s first complaint in April, leading the president to refile the lawsuit in May.
"President Trump will continue to press forward in his powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other defendants,” a spokesperson for the president’s legal team said in a statement Saturday. “The President will continue to hold those who mislead the American People with Fake News and smears accountable for their actions.”
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