A federal judge has again dismissed President Donald Trump’s defamation claims against the Wall Street Journal over a report the newspaper published in 2025 that alleged Trump wrote a 2003 birthday letter to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump’s lawsuit “falls short of a defense of actual malice,” U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles wrote in his opinion Saturday. “In fact, allegations of bad faith are precise, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the Clause, and generally irrelevant to whether Defendants knew or should have known that the statements in the Clause were allegedly false.” Judge Gayles dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot reintroduce the claim.
In April, Judge Gayles ruled that the case “does not sufficiently allege actual malice,” a legal standard for proving defamation in the United States. At the time, the court dismissed the complaint “without prejudice” because the applicant made only one attempt to state his allegations.
Trump demanded at least $20 billion in damages on two defamation charges in the first lawsuit, filed in July 2025. Trump told the WSJ that its parent companies, Dow Jones & Co. and sued News Corp, the story’s reporters and Rupert Murdoch.
“We have filed a POWERHOUSE Lawsuit against everyone involved in the publication of a lying, malicious, defamatory FAKE NEWS ‘article’ in the useless ‘rag’ that is The Wall Street Journal,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time. “I hope Rupert and his ‘friends’ are looking forward to many hours of testimony and deposition in this case.”