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A federal judge on Monday threw out President Donald Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, ruling that the president had failed to meet the legal bar required to prove the publication acted with deliberate dishonesty.
District Judge Darrin Gayles, appointed by former President Barack Obama, issued a 17-page ruling dismissing the case after finding that Trump had not plausibly demonstrated the Murdoch-owned newspaper knowingly published false statements — the standard under US defamation law known as "actual malice." Gayles gave Trump until April 27 to amend and refile his complaint.
"Because President Trump has not plausibly alleged that defendants published the article with actual malice, both Counts must be dismissed," Gayles wrote.
A spokesman for Trump's legal team said the suit would be resubmitted, vowing that the president would "continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People."
Trump filed the lawsuit in July against the Journal and its owner, media magnate Rupert Murdoch, after the paper published a report claiming he had sent a birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, when the two were close. According to the Journal, the letter, which was part of an album of messages from wealthy and prominent figures marking Epstein's 50th birthday, was described as "bawdy" and included a hand-drawn illustration of a naked woman, along with a reference to a shared "secret" between the two men.
Trump has maintained that he ended his friendship with Epstein before the financier pleaded guilty in 2008 in Florida to solicitation of prostitution with a minor.
Epstein was found dead in a New York federal detention cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide, though it has been the subject of persistent and wide-ranging conspiracy theories.
The Epstein affair has cast a long shadow over Trump's second term in office and has contributed to the downfall of a number of prominent figures around the world who were linked to the financier. Over the past year, the US Justice Department has released large volumes of documents related to Epstein, in which Trump, 79, appears frequently, though he has not been formally accused of any wrongdoing.
Trump has elevated the pressure on news organizations since returning to the White House. His administration has restricted press access, publicly attacked journalists critical of his policies, and filed multiple high-stakes lawsuits against outlets he accuses of bias.
The Journal lawsuit is among the most prominent of these actions, targeting a publication owned by Murdoch, a longtime power broker in conservative media circles, and seeking damages of a scale rarely seen in American defamation litigation.
The "actual malice" standard, established by the US Supreme Court in its landmark 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan, sets a high threshold for public figures pursuing defamation claims, requiring proof that a publisher acted with knowledge that a statement was false or with reckless disregard for the truth.
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