MIAMI.- A federal judge on Saturday, October 31, threw out President Donald Trump's defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over its reporting on a birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein — and this time, the door is closed. U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot refile the same claims in this court, ruling that the president failed to plausibly allege the newspaper acted with "actual malice."
Gayles, based in Miami, said Trump's allegations were conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article and often irrelevant to his argument that the Journal published its 2025 report knowing it was false or recklessly disregarding whether it was true — the standard public figures must meet under the Supreme Court's 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The judge said the lawsuit was "grasping at straws" and had attempted to "manufacture" flaws in the Journal's investigative reporting. He also rejected Trump's argument that the Journal should have withheld its story after he denied writing the letter, saying such a rule would block journalists from publishing negative or contradictory press whenever a public figure denies an accusation.
A second dismissal, after a second chance
This was Trump's second defeat in the same case. Gayles had already dismissed the original complaint in April, ruling that it relied on formulaic assertions of malice that came nowhere close to the legal standard — but he dismissed it without prejudice and gave Trump a chance to file an amended complaint, which he did in May. Saturday's ruling found the revised complaint still failed to resolve those issues and dismissed it with prejudice.
Trump sued in July 2025 after the Journal reported that a book assembled for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003 included a letter bearing Trump's name, with typewritten text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and signed "Donald." Trump denied writing or signing the letter and accused the paper of knowingly publishing a false story. He sued the Journal's publisher Dow Jones, its parent News Corp, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson and Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, and two Journal reporters, seeking at least $10 billion in damages on each of his two defamation claims.
Trump can still appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and reporting on the order says the defendants were given 30 days to ask the court to make Trump pay their attorneys' fees. But in the trial court, the case is over: as the judge put it, as with his first attempt, he has failed.
Fuentes: CNN, 31 de octubre de 2026; The Wall Street Journal, 31 de octubre de 2026; Editor & Publisher (Reuters, Associated Press), 31 de octubre de 2026.