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U.S. President Donald Trump sued the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, on Friday for at least $10 billion in damages for a report that claimed he wrote a lewd birthday letter to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“We have just filed a POWERHOUSE lawsuit against everyone involved in publishing the false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS 'article' in the useless 'rag' that is The Wall Street Journal," Trump wrote in a social media post.
The WSJ revealed Thursday that a letter from Trump was included in an album that was created to celebrate the 50th birthday of the disgraced financier.
The leather-bound memento was compiled by Epstein's longtime aide and convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003, according to the newspaper.
Trump's lawsuit, which he called a "historic legal action," targets WSJ reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo, whose names appear in the article's byline, as well as the newspaper, its parent companies News Corp and Dow Jones, Murdoch, and News Corp executive Robert Thomson.
Filed in a Miami federal court, it accuses the defendants of "clear journalistic failures" and claims that the newspaper was false, defamatory, unsubstantiated, and disparaging."
"I hope Rupert and his 'friends' are looking forward to the many hours of depositions and testimonies they will have to provide in this case," the US president added on Truth Social.
The WSJ report came as Trump finds himself in a whirlwind with the Epstein files—the collection of government documents that the Justice Department has so far refused to make public—that is driving the largest wedge to date within the president's Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement, which he popularized during his 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns.
The Justice Department announced last week that it determined Epstein died by suicide in 2019 and claimed he had no "client list," sparking discontent among the president’s MAGA supporters.
Trump has called the Epstein scandal a "hoax" and demanded his supporters move on, even as they continue to clamor for the release of the documents, including the "client list" that Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February was "sitting on my desk right now."
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