Judge Dismisses Trump's Wall Street Journal Lawsuit With Prejudice: 'Grasping at Straws'
A federal judge in Miami has thrown out President Trump's defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over its Epstein birthday-book reporting for the second time — this time permanently — ruling the president did not plausibly allege the paper acted with actual malice.
President Donald Trump's defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal is over at the trial court. U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles in Miami dismissed the case with prejudice on Saturday, ruling that Trump failed to plausibly allege that the Journal acted with actual malice — the legal standard a public figure must meet — when it published its 2025 story about a letter bearing Trump's name in a birthday book compiled for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003.
It was the second dismissal this year. Gayles first threw out the suit in April, finding the original complaint's malice assertions formulaic, and allowed a refile; the revised complaint, he wrote Saturday, still failed, with allegations he called conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article, and often irrelevant. The judge also rejected Trump's argument that the Journal should have withheld the story after he denied writing the letter, saying such a requirement would violate the First Amendment — a rule that, in his reasoning, would let any public figure block negative reporting simply by denying it. Reporting on the ruling described the complaint as grasping at straws in an attempt to manufacture flaws in the Journal's investigative reporting.
The suit, filed in July 2025, named the Journal's publisher Dow Jones, its parent News Corp, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, chairman emeritus Rupert Murdoch, and two Journal reporters, seeking at least $10 billion on each of two defamation claims. Trump denied writing the letter and called the story false and defamatory. A dismissal with prejudice means the same lawsuit cannot be filed again; Trump's legal team has signaled it plans to appeal, which is now the only road the case has left.
