A second dismissal, this time permanent
A US judge has thrown out President Donald Trump's 10 billion dollar (7.4 billion pounds) lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, ruling that the suit was "grasping at straws" and ran counter to the First Amendment, which protects freedom of the press. US District Judge Darrin Gayles, sitting in federal court in Miami, dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning the suit cannot be filed again.
Trump had sued the newspaper's parent company Dow Jones and its leader Rupert Murdoch last year after the Journal reported on a letter allegedly written by Trump to the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as part of a birthday book compiled in 2003, before Epstein was charged with sex crimes. Trump has denied writing or signing the letter. The lawsuit accused the paper and its reporters of having knowingly and recklessly published false, defamatory and disparaging statements, which it alleged caused the president overwhelming financial and reputational harm.
This was Trump's second attempt to sue over the story. Gayles had already once dismissed the defamation lawsuit, which at that stage sought 20 billion dollars in damages. Trump's team refiled the suit seeking 10 billion dollars, and this time the judge threw out the case with prejudice, closing the door on another refiling in the same court. A spokesman for the president's legal team has said the ruling will be appealed to the US Court of Appeals, so the legal fight may not be over, even though the current complaint is dead.
The actual malice test
The ruling turns on a demanding legal standard. Under US law, public figures who sue for defamation must prove that the defendant published statements with actual malice, meaning with knowledge that they were false or with reckless disregard for whether they were false. In a 20 page ruling, Gayles found that Trump's legal team had not met that bar. He wrote that the allegations regarding malice were conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article itself, and often irrelevant to whether the defendants knew or should have known that the statements in the article were purportedly false.
The judge also addressed the argument at the heart of the complaint: that the letter obtained and released by the Journal, which features a signature at the bottom, could not be authentic because it differs from Trump's distinctive full signature. The White House has maintained that the signature is not Trump's. But Gayles ruled that this argument was not what the actual malice standard requires, and that it ran afoul of the First Amendment. In other words, a dispute about a signature, even a genuine one, does not by itself prove that journalists knowingly published a falsehood.
Gayles was notably positive about the reporting itself. He noted the paper's "thoughtful and detailed investigation" that led to the story, and said the lawsuit was "grasping at straws" in an attempt to "manufacture flaws" in the journalists' work. That language matters because it goes beyond a technical dismissal: the judge was saying not only that the complaint failed legally, but that it misrepresented the reporting it attacked. The ruling cited the Supreme Court's landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v Sullivan, which established the actual malice standard and made it deliberately hard for public figures to win libel cases, precisely to protect robust reporting on people in power.
A historic photograph of Broad Street looking south from Wall Street in New York City
Credit: Wikimedia Commons, public domain (Library of Congress)
What the Journal reported, and what remains alleged
Care is needed here, because the underlying story concerns an allegation, not an established fact. According to the Journal's reporting, the letter bearing Trump's name was included in an album compiled for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003, reportedly collected by Ghislaine Maxwell. The newspaper described the letter as containing suggestive language and a drawing of the outline of a woman's body, and reported that it ended with the words: "Happy Birthday, and may every day be another wonderful secret." Trump has denied writing the letter, called the story false, malicious and defamatory, and maintains the signature is not his.
Two months after the initial report, the US House Oversight Committee published the full birthday book, which, according to subsequent reporting, featured a page matching the Journal's description. That publication does not settle the question of authorship, and this article does not present the letter as proven to be Trump's work. The court case was about whether the Journal's reporting was defamatory, not about whether Trump wrote the letter, and the judge's ruling answers the first question without deciding the second.
The Journal's story landed at a sensitive moment. It came as the Trump administration battled intense bipartisan criticism over the summer for its handling of Epstein documents. Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, after first being arrested in 2006. The long public interest in his connections to powerful figures is the backdrop to the case, but it is not evidence about any individual letter, and readers should keep that distinction in mind.
A wider fight over the press
The dismissal is a blow to Trump and his administration, which have pursued adversarial relationships with news organisations during his second term. He remains involved in lawsuits involving the BBC and the Associated Press, and most recently CNN, MS Now and Politico, which are suing him for restored access after he banned them from the White House in mid-September. The pattern is a familiar one in this presidency: legal and political pressure on media outlets, met in court by First Amendment defences that have, in this instance, prevailed decisively.
The ruling will also be read as a reminder of how high the bar is for public figures in American defamation law. The actual malice standard, set more than sixty years ago, was designed to give journalists room to report on powerful people without fear that every error, or every disputed document, would lead to ruinous damages. Critics of the standard argue it makes it too hard for genuinely defamed people to win. Supporters argue it is the price of a free press. Judge Gayles's ruling comes down firmly on the second side, and its with prejudice dismissal, the strongest form of rejection available, signals that the court saw little merit in giving the complaint a third life.
What happens next depends on the appeal. If the Court of Appeals upholds the dismissal, the lawsuit ends. If it overturns the ruling, the case could be relaunched. Either way, the episode has already clarified something important: a president can sue a newspaper for 10 billion dollars, lose twice, and still face the same constitutional question he faced at the start. In American law, the press does not have to prove its reporting was perfect. It has to be shown to have acted with knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. On the evidence presented, Judge Gayles found that it had not, and the Journal's reporting on the Epstein birthday book stands.
Read more on Verity: Trump's biggest economic problem looks familiar, Trump voter fraud claims and the evidence, Police Scotland inquiries touch Andrew and Epstein, Neil Young sues the Trump campaign. Browse the Politics section, the News section and the World section, or return to the Verity homepage and learn more about Verity.
External sources: BBC News report, Nile Post BBC copy, BritBrief report, Great Yorkshire Radio report, World Today Journal report, The Wall Street Journal, US Courts.
