Judge dismisses Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against Wall Street Journal over Epstein birthday letter
A federal judge in Miami has dismissed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over its report on an alleged 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, ruling that Trump failed to show actual malice.
A federal judge in Miami has dismissed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and media magnate Rupert Murdoch, ending — at least for now — a long-running legal fight over the newspaper’s reporting on an alleged birthday letter to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein. US District Judge Darrin Gayles issued the ruling on Saturday, 31 October 2026, and dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot file an amended version of the same complaint.
The central legal question was whether Trump could show that the newspaper and Murdoch acted with “actual malice” — that is, that they published statements they knew were false or acted with reckless disregard for whether they were true. That is the high standard US law sets for defamation claims by public figures. Judge Gayles ruled that Trump had not met it, writing, according to reports of the ruling, that the president had “not plausibly alleged that each defendant made defamatory statements with actual malice”.
The judge’s language was unusually blunt. Reports of the order say he described the lawsuit as “grasping at straws” in its attempt to “manufacture” flaws in the Journal’s investigative reporting. That phrasing matters because it goes beyond a narrow procedural point: the court was not simply saying a form had been filled in incorrectly, but that the complaint, even after revision, did not build a credible case that the reporting was knowingly or recklessly false.
This was Trump’s second attempt at the claim. Judge Gayles had already dismissed an earlier version of the lawsuit in April, saying Trump had failed to argue that the article was published with malicious intent. The court allowed Trump to revise and refile, and the amended complaint was the version dismissed on Saturday. Because this was the second attempt, the judge found that dismissal with prejudice was appropriate, closing the door to a third amended complaint in the same case.
The dispute goes back to a Wall Street Journal article published in July 2025. The newspaper reported that a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump’s name appeared in a birthday album compiled in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday. According to the Journal, the letter was collected by Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite later convicted in connection with Epstein’s abuse, as part of that album, years before Epstein’s first arrest in 2006 and his later falling-out with Trump.
The reported letter itself has been widely described in coverage since. The Journal said the text was framed by the outline of what appeared to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ended with the words: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump has denied writing the letter, calling the reporting false, malicious and defamatory, and reports say he personally contacted Murdoch before publication in an effort to stop the story. The Journal published it anyway, under a headline about Epstein’s friends sending him bawdy letters for a 50th birthday album.
The letter later entered the public record through another route. The House Oversight Committee published a copy of the alleged birthday note last year, after it was provided by Epstein’s estate, showing a short dialogue between “Donald” and “Jeffrey”. That publication did not settle the central dispute in the lawsuit — whether the Journal acted with actual malice when it first reported the letter’s existence and attributed it to Trump — but it meant the document itself was no longer only a newspaper’s description.
The ruling arrives in a charged political moment. The United States holds midterm elections on Tuesday, 3 November, which will decide control of Congress, and Epstein-related material has become a campaign issue: one report on the dismissal noted that Democrats have spent more than $35 million on Epstein-related advertisements ahead of the vote. Trump had also fought for months to prevent the Department of Justice from releasing the so-called Epstein files, before eventually signing a law passed by Congress requiring their publication.
For the Journal and Murdoch, the dismissal is a significant legal victory, and for press-freedom advocates it is likely to be cited as an example of the actual-malice standard doing the work it was designed to do: protecting reporting on public figures unless a claimant can show knowing or reckless falsehood. For Trump, the ruling removes a $10 billion claim he had pursued personally, though it does not, by itself, resolve the wider political argument about his past association with Epstein, which his critics continue to raise and his supporters continue to dismiss.
What happens next is still open. The reports reviewed for this post did not carry an immediate response from Trump, the Journal or Murdoch to Saturday’s ruling, and a dismissal with prejudice at district-court level is the kind of decision a losing party may seek to challenge on appeal, or may choose to leave standing. Either way, the case as filed in Miami is now closed unless a higher court is asked to revisit it, and the episode is likely to remain part of the final-days argument in the midterm campaign, even as the courtroom chapter itself comes to an end.
More in USA
USAWashington DC and Virginia sue to block Trump’s triumphal arch, calling it “flagrantly unlawful”
USARecord early voting passes 51 million in US midterms as Alaska probe intensifies and California ballot fight heads to Supreme Court
USA