Trump's $10bn Epstein letter claim against Wall Street Journal dismissed

What happened

Donald Trump's $10bn defamation case over a birthday letter attributed to him has been dismissed by a federal judge in Miami. The president had challenged The Wall Street Journal's coverage of a message included in a birthday collection for Jeffrey Epstein, denying that he wrote or signed it.

US District Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that Trump's case failed to meet the legal threshold required when a public figure sues for defamation. The defendants included the newspaper's parent company, Dow Jones, and media proprietor Rupert Murdoch. Trump's lawyers intend to appeal.

The dismissal was with prejudice, preventing Trump from filing the same claim again in the trial court. It followed an earlier dismissal of a lawsuit seeking $20bn in damages. His legal team then submitted a revised case seeking half that amount, which Gayles has now rejected.

In a 20-page decision, the judge concluded that Trump had not established actual malice: the requirement to show that a publisher knew a defamatory statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it was true. That standard was central to the outcome, rather than the size of the damages demand.

Gayles rejected the argument that Trump's denial should have stopped publication. The president's lawyers had maintained that, after he denied authorship when approached by the newspaper, its journalists should have set aside the other evidence gathered during their investigation.

The judge found that approach incompatible with the First Amendment's protection of press freedom. His reasoning was that allowing a public figure's denial to determine whether an allegation could be published would prevent journalists from reporting adverse information whenever its subject disputed it.

The background

The disputed message formed part of an album assembled for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. The wealthy financier, who later became a convicted sex offender, was first arrested in 2006. The birthday collection therefore predated that arrest and the subsequent breakdown of his relationship with Trump.

British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell collected contributions for the album. The item attributed to Trump combined typed passages with a drawing outlining a woman's body and carried what appeared to be his signature. Its suggestive wording and presentation became the focus of the dispute over authorship.

The Wall Street Journal published its story last year, during a summer in which the Trump administration faced criticism from both major US political parties over its handling of Epstein-related documents. The birthday album brought a separate historical document into that wider controversy.

Trump alleged that the letter was fabricated and that the defendants had constructed the story to damage his reputation. Those allegations underpinned his claim that publishing the article broke defamation law; his position was not simply that the coverage was unwelcome or embarrassing.

The case also sits within a broader series of legal confrontations between Trump and news organisations during his second term. These include disputes involving the BBC and The Associated Press, alongside litigation over journalists' access to the White House.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico are suing to regain access after Trump excluded them in mid-September. Those proceedings concern the ability of news organisations to cover the presidency, rather than the authorship of the Epstein letter or the legal standard applied to its publication.

What people are saying

Dow Jones welcomed the decision through a spokesperson. The company's response followed a ruling in which Gayles praised the depth and care of the newspaper's investigation and rejected the lawsuit's attempts to identify defects in that work.

A spokesperson for Trump's legal team said the president would challenge the dismissal and continue pursuing the defendants. The team maintained that its legal action was intended to hold news organisations accountable for misleading the public and damaging Trump's reputation.

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt had also disputed the letter's authenticity after its publication. In a post on X, she supported Trump's denial, saying he had neither produced the drawing nor signed the document. Her response placed the administration firmly behind his account of the contested item.

These positions reflect different questions within the dispute: Trump and the White House contest authorship, while the court's decision addresses whether his allegations satisfy the legal requirements for a defamation case. Dismissal of that case does not itself establish who created the letter.

What happens next

An appeal is the route Trump's lawyers say they will take following the latest ruling. The distinction matters because a dismissal with prejudice closes off refiling the same claim in the trial court but does not remove the right to seek review by a higher court.

In the federal system, an appeal generally examines the lower court's decision on the existing record and the parties' legal arguments. It is not ordinarily a fresh trial at which witnesses are called to give their evidence again. An appellate court can uphold a judgment or overturn it and send proceedings back.

Any challenge to this ruling would confront the judge's application of the actual-malice standard. In this context, malice has a specific legal meaning: it is not established merely by showing hostility towards the person being written about, or a desire to publish a damaging story.

Nor does a contested statement automatically meet that threshold because its subject calls it false. The distinction is between a dispute over accuracy and evidence about the publisher's knowledge or reckless disregard at the time of publication. Gayles treated Trump's argument about his denial as insufficient to bridge that distinction.

The First Amendment gives this dispute a specifically American constitutional setting. Its protections for speech and the press constrain the circumstances in which public figures can recover damages for defamatory publication. They do not provide an unconditional exemption from liability for news organisations.

The $10bn figure was the compensation Trump sought, not a financial penalty imposed on the defendants. With the revised claim dismissed, the judgment does not require them to pay that sum. The proposed appeal concerns whether the case can proceed despite the trial court's decision.

Why this matters

For UK readers, the ruling illustrates an important difference between American and domestic defamation law. Courts in England and Wales apply a serious-harm requirement and recognise a defence for publication on a matter of public interest. They do not use the same constitutional actual-malice test for public figures, so the Miami decision does not set the rules for a British libel claim.

The dispute is also relevant to audiences following Trump's separate confrontation with the BBC: the cases belong to a wider conflict over presidential scrutiny, but this judgment determines only the claim before Gayles. Its practical significance for reporting in the United States is that a politician's denial cannot, by itself, require a newspaper to abandon an otherwise investigated story.