Judge permanently tosses Trump suit against Wall Street Journal over Epstein letter

Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles dismissed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over the outlet’s reporting on a birthday letter Trump allegedly sent Jeffrey Epstein.Gayles issued the order granting the outlet’s motion to dismiss with prejudice on Saturday, meaning Trump cannot refile another lawsuit over the same issue and cannot challenge the judge’s decision. Gayles, the district judge in the Southern District of Florida, ruled that Trump did not convincingly argue that the outlet defamed him with actual malice in writing the story.Trump sued the outlet over its decision to publish the alleged crude birthday letter to Epstein from 2003, maintaining that he never wrote it, while the Wall Street Journal has defended its reporting This is the second time Gayles has dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that Trump had not properly demonstrated actual malice. The judge initially dismissed without prejudice in April 2026, allowing Trump to refile an amended complaint in May.Trump’s amended complaint took issue with the outlet’s pre-publication investigation of the July 2025 article, the outlet’s decision to publish the piece despite Trump’s denial of the alleged letter, and several omitted details in the story, such as how the defendants obtained a copy of the alleged birthday letter.In his final dismissal on Saturday, Gayles wrote that Trump was “grasping at straws” as he attempted “to manufacture flaws with the investigation” of the article in the amended complaint. He also disagreed with Trump on how the article characterized his denial, writing that “it informed readers that President Trump decried the Letter as a fake and denied writing it.”“In effect, President Trump argues that once he declared the Letter a ‘fake,’ Defendants should have disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story. But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment,” Gayles wrote.“Indeed, were that the law, any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press—a result that flies in the face of the ‘American privilege to speak one’s mind, although not always with perfect good taste, on all public institutions,'” Gayles continued.Trump’s lawyers argued that the outlet “falsely, maliciously, and defamatorily” accused Trump of writing the alleged birthday letter. They added in their motion to deny the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case that the outlet never “attempted to prove” that Trump wrote the letter in the article or in the legal case.“Authorship is not merely something Defendants cannot prove — it is something they never even attempted to prove. They never identified the source of the letter, authenticated the signature, or explained how they attributed the typewritten text to President Trump,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a filing.The outlet reported that the alleged birthday letter, detailed in its story, was part of an album of letters from friends and acquaintances that Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, compiled for his 50th birthday. The outlet wrote that the letter and album came before Epstein was first arrested on sex crime charges.DOJ ISSUES RARE SUBPOENAS TO WALL STREET JOURNAL OVER ALLEGED LEAKING OF CLASSIFIED MATERIALTrump’s lawyers also took issue with the fact that the authors of the story “had no corroboration from Maxwell” in their story. Gayles called this argument a “red herring.”Trump, who has stated that he cut off ties with Epstein years before Epstein’s initial arrest, was seeking no less than $10 billion in financial and reputational damages from the defendants.