WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Miami on Saturday dismissed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and its owners over a 2025 article about a birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, and the president’s legal team said he would keep pressing the case.
U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles dismissed the amended complaint with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled in his court, ruling that Trump had not plausibly alleged that the Journal acted with actual malice, the standard a public figure must meet to win a libel case, CNBC reported. The 20-page ruling followed an earlier dismissal of Trump’s original complaint in April.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team said in a statement that “President Trump will continue to press forward in his powerhouse lawsuit” and would “hold those who mislead the American People with Fake News and smears accountable,” according to The Guardian. The spokesman confirmed to CNBC that the president plans to appeal.
Trump has consistently denied writing the letter. “This is not me. This is a fake thing,” he said when the article appeared, CNBC reported, and the White House maintains that the signature on the letter is not his, according to NBC News.
What the judge decided
The suit named Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher; its parent company, News Corp; Rupert Murdoch; and the reporters who wrote the July 17, 2025, article, which described a letter bearing Trump’s name in a 2003 birthday album compiled for Epstein.
Gayles wrote that the newspaper had conducted a “thoughtful and detailed investigation” and rejected the complaint’s attacks on its reporting. “Grasping at straws, the Amended Complaint attempts to manufacture flaws with the investigation,” he wrote, according to CNBC. “As with his first attempt, he has failed.”
The judge also addressed Trump’s argument that the newspaper should not have published after he denied writing the letter. Accepting that argument would allow public figures to block reporting simply by issuing a denial, a result that “runs afoul of the First Amendment,” Gayles wrote, as quoted by CNBC. Lawyers for the Journal had argued that the story was accurate and that the reporters neither knowingly published false information nor acted with reckless disregard for the truth, The Guardian reported.
The ruling did not decide whether Trump wrote the letter. It turned on whether the complaint alleged facts showing that the Journal knew the article was false or recklessly disregarded the truth, the test set by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan in 1964.
The response
Dow Jones said in a statement, “We’re pleased with the court’s decision,” CNBC reported.
The president has pursued several lawsuits against news organizations, arguing that they have published false and damaging stories about him.
In a separate case, another federal judge in Miami on Oct. 22 ordered Trump to sit for a deposition by Dec. 11 in his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC, CNBC reported.
An appeal would go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which hears cases from federal courts in Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
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