'Grasping at Straws': Federal Judge Dismisses Trump's $10 Billion Wall Street Journal Lawsuit Over the Epstein Letter - for Good

MIAMI - A federal judge on Saturday dismissed President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch over the paper's reporting on his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and he dismissed it with prejudice - a permanent end to the case that cannot be refiled, the Associated Press reported.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that the president did not prove the defendants made defamatory statements with actual malice, the legal standard a public figure must meet. In his ruling, Gayles wrote that the lawsuit was "grasping at straws" as it attempted to "manufacture" flaws in the Journal's investigative reporting. "The Amended Complaint falls short of pleading actual malice," he wrote. "Indeed, the allegations regarding malice are conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the Article, and often irrelevant." The judge cited the Supreme Court's landmark 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, and noted that the Journal's story had not ignored Trump's position: it informed readers that the president decried the letter as a fake and denied writing it.

The lawsuit grew out of a Journal story published last year describing a sexually suggestive letter and drawing that the paper said bore Trump's name and was included in a 2003 album compiled for Epstein's 50th birthday - an album reportedly collected by Ghislaine Maxwell years before Epstein's first arrest in 2006. According to the newspaper, the letter's text is framed by the outline of a hand-drawn naked woman and ends, "Happy Birthday - and may every day be another wonderful secret." Trump denied writing it and called the story "false, malicious, and defamatory," and his suit accused the paper and its reporters of "knowingly and recklessly" publishing false and disparaging statements that caused "overwhelming financial and reputational harm." Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

It was the second time Gayles dismissed the case: he first threw it out in April, saying Trump had failed to argue the article was published with malicious intent, then allowed an amended complaint in May - which Saturday's ruling ended for good. The White House did not immediately react publicly to the dismissal or respond to an AP request for comment. The ruling lands in the middle of a broader legal war between the president and the press in his second term: he remains embroiled in lawsuits involving the BBC and the Associated Press, and CNN, MS NOW and Politico are suing him for restored White House access after he banished them in mid-September.