Opinion
No Prior Restraint
A federal judge in Miami did something on Saturday that should not be remarkable but is: he applied the First Amendment exactly as written and as the Supreme Court has read it for 62 years.
U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles dismissed, with prejudice, President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against The Wall Street Journal over its July 2025 story about a birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, CNBC reported. The judge found that Trump had not plausibly alleged actual malice, and he said the newspaper had conducted a “thoughtful and detailed investigation.” He had already dismissed the original complaint in April. “As with his first attempt, he has failed,” he wrote.
That is the right result, and it is worth saying why.
The rule that protects everyone’s speech
In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan in 1964, the Supreme Court held that a public official cannot win a libel suit over his official conduct unless he proves the statement was made with “actual malice,” meaning knowledge that it was false or reckless disregard of whether it was false. The court later extended the rule to public figures. Justice William Brennan wrote that debate on public issues should be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”
The rule exists because the alternative is self-censorship. If every powerful person could force a newspaper to prove the truth of every sentence in front of a jury, at a cost of millions of dollars, many editors would simply decline to publish. The people with the most to hide would gain the most protection.
Gayles made precisely this point. Trump argued, in effect, that the Journal should not have published after he denied writing the letter. The judge rejected that idea, writing that it “runs afoul of the First Amendment,” according to CNBC. A denial cannot be a veto. If it were, any public figure could kill any story by issuing a statement.
The president’s frustration is real, and still not a reason
Trump has said the letter is “a fake thing,” and the White House maintains the signature is not his, NBC News reported. A spokesman for his legal team said he would “continue to press forward,” according to The Guardian, and he plans to appeal. He has every right to do so. Courts exist to hear grievances, including a president’s.
But the size of the demand matters. A $10 billion claim against a newspaper is not a request for a correction. It is a weapon. Even a suit that fails costs a publisher legal fees, management time and, for smaller outlets, sometimes survival. The Journal can afford to win. A local paper or an independent reporter might not.
This is not a partisan point. The rule that protects the Journal today protects a conservative blogger tomorrow.
Finish the job with anti-SLAPP protection
The case shows what the law still lacks. Forty states now have statutes against strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPPs, according to the Institute for Free Speech, which tracks them. The best of them let defendants seek early dismissal of meritless suits over speech on public issues and recover attorney fees. A growing number of states have adopted the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, a model law from the nonpartisan Uniform Law Commission, the Institute reports.
But there is no federal anti-SLAPP law, and many high-profile speech suits end up in federal court. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, introduced the Free Speech Protection Act in 2024 to create a special motion to dismiss such suits in federal court. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee and never got a vote. Congress should take it up again, with sponsors from both parties.
A federal law would not stop anyone from suing. It would require plaintiffs to show early on that they have a real case, and it would make them pay the other side’s legal bills when they do not. That is a modest price for protecting the most important right a free people has: the right to report on, and argue about, the people who govern them.
The Journal will be fine. The next defendant may not be. Congress should make sure the next Judge Gayles has the tools to end a meritless case before it ends a newspaper.
Silas Wren is the pen name of a Washington Inquisitor opinion columnist writing from a free speech absolutist perspective. The views expressed are the author’s own and not those of The Washington Inquisitor.
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