Judge dismisses Trump's lawsuit against Wall Street Journal over Epstein birthday book

Judge throws out Trump’s lawsuit against Wall Street Journal over Epstein birthday book

A US judge has dismissed President Donald Trump’s $10bn lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, saying the case was “grasping at straws.”

Trump filed the suit last year against the newspaper’s parent company, Dow Jones, and its owner Rupert Murdoch after the Journal reported on a letter allegedly written by Trump to disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as part of a birthday book in 2003, before Epstein was charged with sex crimes.

Trump has denied writing or signing the letter, which contained suggestive wording and a sketch of the outline of a woman’s body.

Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the case, ruling that it conflicts with the First Amendment, which protects freedom of the press.

Gayles had already dismissed the defamation case once before, when it sought $20 billion in damages. Trump’s team then refiled it seeking $10 billion, and this time the judge dismissed it “with prejudice,” meaning it cannot be brought again.

- and the letter with Trump’s name - came as the Trump administration faced heavy bipartisan criticism over the summer for its handling of Epstein documents.

Trump had said the newspaper had defamed him and broken libel laws by publishing the article.

In his 20-page ruling, Gayles pointed to the paper’s “thoughtful and detailed ​investigation” behind the story and said the lawsuit was “grasping at ‌straws” in an effort “to manufacture flaws” in its work.

The judge said Trump’s legal team failed to show that the defendants made defamatory statements with “actual malice,” which the law requires.

Actual malice is a difficult standard to meet, because it requires proof that the defendant knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true.

Trump claimed the letter obtained and published by the Journal, which includes his signature at the bottom, was “fake” and that the defendants created the story to defame him.

Trump’s lawyers argued that because Trump denied writing the letter when the Journal contacted him, the paper should have “disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story,” Gayles wrote.

“But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment,” Gayles wrote.

If that were the rule, he wrote, then “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’”.

According to the Wall Street Journal story, a letter bearing Trump’s name “contained several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.”

It reportedly included a joking reference that “enigmas never age” and allegedly ended with the words: “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday - and may every day be another wonderful secret”.