Judge throws out Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against Wall Street Journal
A federal judge threw out Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal.
The short version
- The suit targeted an article about a birthday letter sent to Jeffrey Epstein.
- The judge ruled the newspaper did not act with actual malice.
- Trump plans to appeal the ruling.
A federal judge threw out Donald Trump’s renewed $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and ruled that it can’t be filed again, marking another setback for the president’s legal fights with the press. Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami on Saturday granted the request by the Wall Street Journal, a daily business newspaper, to dismiss the suit.
The newspaper was accused in the complaint of defaming Trump in an article saying that Trump once sent a suggestive birthday letter to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal custody while awaiting sex-trafficking charges. The judge first tossed the suit in April for lacking evidence, but he gave Trump a chance to file a new one.
Trump in May filed the revised version, which the Journal argued was not an improvement. The judge said Trump was grasping at straws by arguing that the Journal failed to properly investigate the story, citing the journalists’ extensive reporting. The decision is a major win for the Journal, parent company News Corp., a global publishing company, and Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, all defendants in the suit.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team signaled the president will appeal the ruling, according to Insurance Journal. The case is part of a series of lawsuits that Trump or his business interests have filed since he retook the White House last year, including multibillion-dollar complaints against the New York Times and the British Broadcasting Corporation.
The judge ruled that as with his first lawsuit, Trump had failed to show the Journal acted with actual malice, the legal standard for public figures to prove defamation. Trump sued over a July 2025 story that said he’d sent a birthday note to the disgraced financier in 2003. Trump has repeatedly claimed the note is fake.
