A federal judge has permanently dismissed US President Donald Trump’s $10 billion amended defamation case against the Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch over a report about his letter to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In July 2025, the WSJ published an article describing a sexually suggestive note, which Trump allegedly presented to the disgraced financier for his 50th birthday in 2003. It reportedly appeared in a book of congratulatory letters put together by Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her participation in Epstein’s sex-trafficking scheme.
The note, which, among other things, said: “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” contained several lines of typed text framed by a hand-drawn outline of what looks to be a nude woman. A signature resembling the one used by Trump appeared in the area where the figure’s pelvic region might be.
Following the publication, the US president vigorously denied the authorship of the raunchy birthday card, claiming: “This is not me. This is a fake thing. I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women.”
Trump’s initial defamation case against the Wall Street Journal and Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns the outlet, was rejected by US District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami in April. However, he allowed the president’s team to fix the legal defects that he had identified and file another complaint.
On Saturday, the same judge threw out Trump’s second attempt to sue the WSJ and Murdoch, saying that “as with his first attempt, he has failed” to prove that the defendants acted with actual malice when they reported on the birthday card.
Gayles disagreed with Trump’s lawyers, who argued that the outlet should have dropped the story as soon as the president denied his involvement with Epstein. “That is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment,” he wrote in a 20-page ruling.
The judge dismissed the case “with prejudice,” meaning that it cannot be refiled again.
A spokesperson for the WSJ’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., said in a statement that it’s “pleased with the court’s decision.”
The representative of Trump’s legal team insisted that “the president will continue to hold those who mislead the American People with Fake News and smears accountable for their actions.” A source told CBS News that the ruling by Gayles will likely be appealed.
Trump has repeatedly denied having been friendly with Epstein, who died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. However, the US president’s name is mentioned on at least 3,000 occasions in a massive trove of files related to the investigation of Epstein’s case, which had been released by the US Department of Justice last year.