Judge permanently throws out Trump’s Wall Street Journal defamation lawsuit over Epstein letter story
The president failed to show the newspaper acted with ‘actual malice’ by publishing sexually suggestive birthday note
A federal judge has thrown out Donald Trump’s second attempt to sue The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch, and the journalists and publishers who reported on his alleged birthday letter to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which the president claims does not exist.
The letter — allegedly signed by Trump and featuring a sexually suggestive drawing and a birthday wish that says “may every day be another wonderful secret” — was first published by the newspaper and then shared with members of Congress by the Epstein estate last year.
Trump has repeatedly denied writing the letter and denied that a signature on the document is his. He filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit last summer, claiming that “no authentic letter or drawing exists” and blasted the story as a “false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS ‘article’ in the useless ‘rag’ that is.”
On Saturday, the judge overseeing the case dismissed the president’s lawsuit with prejudice, meaning Trump is permanently barred from trying to bring another case against the outlet.
Trump failed to prove “actual malice,” the legal standard for proving defamation, according to Florida Judge Darrin P. Gayles. The president’s allegations 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,” the judge wrote.
The president appears to argue that, despite his denials, the newspaper acted with “actual malice” by publishing anyway, Gayles wrote.
“In effect, President Trump argues that once he declared the Letter a ‘fake,’ Defendants should have disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story,” the judge added.
“But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment,” he said. “Indeed, were that the law, any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press.”
The president has been “grasping at straws” to prove his case, according to the judge.
His order opens with a passage from the landmark Supreme Court ruling in The New York Times v Sullivan, which established that the First Amendment prohibits public figures from suing for defamation over allegedly false statements unless they can prove actual malice.
In an order dismissing Trump’s first shot at suing the newspaper, Gayles wrote that the president came “nowhere close to this standard.”
“Quite the opposite,” he wrote in April.
Last year, the newspaper published a 50th birthday greeting to Epstein from 2003, which included a message that said “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey” and “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” all written inside the outline of a woman’s body.
The publication of the letter spurred a wave of new reporting about the government’s handling of investigations into Epstein, drawing more scrutiny into the president’s relationship with the wealthy sex offender and his alleged connections to a wider network of powerful figures.
Trump later reluctantly signed a measure into law compelling the release of millions of documents stemming from Epstein investigations, and members of Congress have launched parallel committee-led investigations into Epstein, his associates and his finances.
The president’s lawsuit “does not include a single plausible allegation” that The Wall Street Journal knowingly published false statements about him, lawyers for the defendants wrote in response last year.
The article is “true,” they wrote, and the evidence is publicly available for anyone to see.
