Judge Dismisses Trump’s $10 Billion Defamation Suit Targeting Murdoch, WSJ Over Epstein Letter

A federal judge in Florida dismissed on Monday President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against media baron Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal, ruling that Trump had not met the legal threshold required of public figures in defamation cases — though the president’s legal team was given until April 27 to file an amended complaint and pursue the case further.

The Ruling

Judge Darrin Gayles of the U.S. District Court in Miami issued the dismissal after concluding that Trump, who has adamantly denied sending a letter to his then-friend Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, had “not plausibly alleged that the Defendants published the Article with actual malice.” Under longstanding legal precedent, public figures such as Trump bear the burden of demonstrating that a defendant acted with actual malice — meaning the defendant either knew a statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity — when bringing a defamation claim.

Gayles stated that Trump’s complaint “falls short of pleading actual malice” and found the president came “nowhere close” to showing that The Wall Street Journal deliberately avoided investigating the truth of what it published about the letter. Notably, the judge pointed to the newspaper’s own reporting as evidence of due diligence: before publishing the story in July 2024, the Journal contacted Trump, the Justice Department, and the FBI for comment. Trump denied authorship; the Justice Department did not respond; the FBI declined to comment.

The judge also observed that the article itself included Trump’s denial of having written the letter — a fact that, in Gayles’s assessment, made any inference of actual malice still less plausible. Nevertheless, citing precedent that a plaintiff “should have the opportunity to amend his complaint” when a lawsuit is dismissed for failing to plead facts giving rise to actual malice, Gayles granted Trump a second chance. Critically, the ruling did not resolve whether the statements published by the Journal were true or whether they constituted defamation on the merits.

The Article and the Letter

The lawsuit stems from a Wall Street Journal article published on July 17, 2024, by reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo. The article reported that a letter bearing Trump’s signature had been included in an album of birthday letters assembled for Epstein’s 50th birthday, sent at the request of Ghislaine Maxwell — who two decades later would be convicted of procuring underage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.

According to the Journal’s reporting, the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.” The reporters described a pair of small arcs denoting the woman’s breasts, with a signature below her waist mimicking pubic hair. The letter, the Journal reported, concluded: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump angrily denied writing the letter upon its publication, and a day later filed suit against the newspaper, the two reporters, Murdoch, News Corp., News Corp. CEO Robert Thompson, and the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones and Co.

Reactions

A spokesman for Trump’s legal team responded to the ruling with a combative statement, saying the president “will follow Judge Gayles’s ruling and guidance to refile this powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other Defendants.” The statement added that Trump “will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People.” The White House declined to offer comment on the ruling, directing questions to Trump’s legal team.

CNBC reported it had requested comment from The Wall Street Journal, owned by Murdoch’s News Corp. empire, but had not received a response at the time of reporting. Lawyers for the defendants had argued in legal filings that the case should be thrown out on three grounds: that the article about the letter is true; that the article is not defamatory in any case; and that Trump had failed to demonstrate actual malice on the newspaper’s part.

A separate and politically charged development came in September 2024, when Democrats in the House of Representatives released an image of what they said appeared to be a letter to Epstein signed by Trump, matching the description in the Journal’s article. The letter was said to have been obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after it issued a subpoena to Epstein’s estate. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, at the time of the release, said the image proved Trump did not draw the picture or sign it — a characterization that itself became a point of contention.

Timeline of Events

What Comes Next

The dismissal does not end the litigation; it resets it. Trump’s legal team has signaled an intention to refile, and the judge’s ruling provides a roadmap of sorts — indicating that a new complaint would need to more specifically and plausibly allege facts giving rise to an inference that The Wall Street Journal knew its reporting was false or recklessly disregarded whether it was. Legal analysts note that clearing the actual malice bar is notoriously difficult for plaintiffs who are public figures, particularly in cases involving news organizations that documented pre-publication contact with the subject of their reporting.

The question of whether the letter is authentic — and whether its depiction by the Journal was defamatory — remains unresolved. The judge’s ruling explicitly declined to address the truth or falsity of the statements in the article, leaving those questions for a potential future proceeding. For now, the legal battle between a sitting president and one of the world’s most powerful media organizations remains open, with its next chapter hinging on whether Trump’s lawyers can construct a complaint that clears the demanding threshold courts have long placed on public figures pursuing defamation claims against the press.

Monday’s ruling underscores how formidable the actual malice doctrine remains as a shield for press freedom — even as the political and financial stakes in disputes between powerful public figures and major news organizations continue to escalate. Whether Trump’s legal team can craft an amended complaint that survives dismissal will test the outer limits of a legal standard designed, half a century ago, to ensure that those who wield public power cannot easily silence their critics through the courts.