A federal judge in Miami on Saturday permanently tossed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch over the paper’s reporting on a birthday letter allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein, but the president’s legal team says the fight is far from over.
U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles of the Southern District of Florida dismissed Trump’s amended complaint with prejudice in a 20-page ruling, meaning the suit cannot be refiled in his court. Gayles found that the president again failed to show the newspaper acted with “actual malice,” the high legal bar public figures must clear to win a defamation case.
“As President Trump has not plausibly alleged that each Defendant made defamatory statements with actual malice, the Amended Complaint must be dismissed,” Gayles wrote.
The judge also took a swipe at the president’s arguments, writing that Trump was “grasping at straws” and describing the malice allegations as conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article itself, and often irrelevant to whether the defendants knew the reporting was false.
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team made clear the president isn’t backing down.
“President Trump will continue to press forward in his powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other defendants,” the spokesperson said.
The ruling marks the second time this year Gayles has thrown out the case. In April, the judge dismissed Trump’s original complaint, finding it came “nowhere close” to the actual malice standard, but gave the president’s attorneys a chance to file a revised version.
That amended complaint included new claims, among them an allegation that Murdoch told Trump “I will handle it” during a phone call the two men had about the story before it ran. Trump’s lawyers also argued the paper was reckless for failing to show how its reporters obtained and verified the letter.
The Journal pushed back, arguing in its motion to dismiss that the article showed the paper had investigated the letter and told readers that Trump called it a fake and denied writing it. The judge noted in his April ruling that Journal reporters had reached out to Trump for comment before publication.
The legal battle stems from a July 17, 2025, Journal article describing a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump’s name that was allegedly included in a 2003 album compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday. The letter reportedly featured typewritten text surrounded by a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman.
Trump has repeatedly and forcefully denied writing the letter or drawing the image, calling the story “false, malicious, and defamatory.” The letter was later made public by Congress after lawmakers subpoenaed records from Epstein’s estate.
Trump sued the day after the story was published, naming the Journal, its parent company Dow Jones, News Corp, Murdoch and the two reporters who wrote the article as defendants.
The case is one of several high-profile legal fights Trump has waged against major media outlets. ABC agreed to pay $15 million in 2024 to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump, and Paramount, the parent company of CBS, settled Trump’s lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris in July 2025.
Fox News and The Wall Street Journal share common ownership.
