Judge Throws Out Trump's $10 Billion Wall Street Journal Lawsuit Over Epstein Birthday Letter

A federal judge in Miami on Saturday threw out President Donald Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, its publisher Dow Jones, its parent company News Corp and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the case with prejudice, which means Trump cannot refile the same claims in the district court. He can still appeal.

The ruling

In a 20-page order, Gayles ruled that Trump had not adequately alleged actual malice, the standard a public figure must meet in a defamation case. The judge described the amended complaint's malice allegations as conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article itself and often irrelevant to whether the defendants knew the reporting was false. The Associated Press reported that the ruling called the lawsuit "grasping at straws" as it tried to "manufacture" flaws in the Journal's investigation.

Gayles had dismissed Trump's original complaint earlier this year and allowed him to amend it. Saturday's order ends that second attempt in the trial court. The judge did not decide whether Trump wrote the letter at the center of the case, and he did not decide whether the Journal's reporting was accurate. He also had not decided whether the defendants are entitled to recover their legal fees.

The story Trump sued over

Trump sued in July 2025 after the Journal reported on a sexually suggestive letter that the paper said bore his name. The letter was included in an album that Ghislaine Maxwell compiled for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003, years before Epstein was first arrested in 2006. According to the newspaper, the letter's text sits inside the outline of a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with a birthday wish that every day be another wonderful secret.

Trump denied writing the letter and called the story "false, malicious, and defamatory." His lawsuit accused the paper and its reporters of knowingly and recklessly publishing false and disparaging statements, and said the reporting caused overwhelming financial and reputational harm.

In September 2025, the House Oversight Committee released a copy of the birthday album that it had subpoenaed from Epstein's estate. Trump maintained that the letter attributed to him was fabricated.

What comes next

A spokesperson for Trump's legal team said the president would continue pursuing the lawsuit against the Journal and the other defendants, according to Axios. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The path that remains open is an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

The case turned on the actual malice test set by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan in 1964. Under that test, a public official suing for defamation must show that a statement was published with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard for whether it was true. Gayles ruled that Trump's amended complaint did not clear that bar.