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A federal judge has once again dismissed President Donald Trump’s defamation claims against the Wall Street Journal over a 2025 report by the paper that a 2003 birthday letter to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein
was purportedly written by Trump.
Trump’s lawsuit “falls short of pleading actual malice,” wrote U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles in his opinion on Saturday. “Indeed, the allegations regarding malice are conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the Article, and often irrelevant to whether Defendants knew or should have known that the statements in the Article were purportedly false.” Judge Gayles dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot refile the claim.
In April, Judge Gayles ruled that the lawsuit “fails to adequately allege actual malice,” a legal standard in the U.S. for proving defamation. At the time, the court dismissed the complaint “without prejudice,” since he had only made one attempt to state his claims.
Trump soughtat least $20 billion in damages on two counts of defamation in the initial suit, filed in July 2025. He sued the WSJ, its parent companies Dow Jones & Co. and News Corp, the reporters on the story and Rupert Murdoch.
“We have just filed a POWERHOUSE Lawsuit against everyone involved in publishing the false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS ‘article’ in the useless ‘rag’ that is, The Wall Street Journal,” Trump wrote at the time on Truth Social. “I hope Rupert and his ‘friends’ are looking forward to the many hours of depositions and testimonies they will have to provide in this case.”
