Donald Trump has fired a fresh salvo in his war with The Wall Street Journal after a judge shot down his first attempt to sue the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper for $10 billion.
The president has refiled his earlier defamation lawsuit in Miami, Florida, after Judge Darrin P. Gayles, an Obama appointee, dismissed his first attempt for coming “nowhere close” to showing the newspaper’s reporting met the threshold for that kind of legal action.
Trump claims the Journal smeared his name by describing a birthday card and nude drawing he allegedly sent to the late pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The president was friends with the disgraced financier for at least a decade, though the two men are thought to have fallen out around 2004, a year after Trump is said to have sent the birthday card.
Trump, by law, needs to show that the newspaper displayed “actual malice” with its reporting to secure his desired $10 billion payout. That amounts to proving either that it published statements its reporters and editors knew were false, or that they otherwise acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth.
Gayles threw out the prior complaint because Trump’s lawyers wholly failed to provide evidence of those claims. They would appear mindful of that fact the second time around. “At the time of publication, Defendants recklessly disregarded whether the Defamatory Statements were true and/or they purposefully avoided the discovery of the truth,” the amended complaint, as reported by Reuters, reads.
Jeremy Barr, a media reporter for The Guardian, posted on X that the judge had given the president’s legal team until Wednesday to refile its suit. He quoted a Trump legal spokesperson, who outlined exactly why they chose to do so.
“The President will continue to hold those who mislead the American People with Fake News and smears accountable for their actions,” the spokesperson said.
Trump’s refiled complaint against the Journal is the latest in a long line of legal actions the president has pursued against media organizations he considers adversarial to his administration and its agenda.
He sued ABC News in March 2024 after anchor George Stephanopoulos stated on air that Trump had previously been found liable for rape. The jury’s finding in that case, concerning claims leveled against the president by journalist E. Jean Carroll, was that Trump was liable for sexual abuse, and not rape, according to New York’s narrow definition of the term.
ABC eventually issued an apology and paid $15 million to Trump’s presidential library fund, in addition to $1 million for his legal fees.
Trump also filed legal action against CBS News in October 2024 over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which he claimed had been deceptively edited in order to give her an edge in the presidential race. He originally filed for $10 billion, and later upped the amount to $20 billion.
Paramount, CBS’s parent company, settled in July 2025. It contributed $16 million to Trump’s presidential library and legal fees. That payment landed just as the media behemoth was seeking federal approval for a lucrative merger with Skydance, controlled by MAGA allies Larry and David Ellison. The merger has since gone through.
The president has pursued or is pursuing further actions against The New York Times, The Des Moines Register, the BBC, CNN, The Washington Post, and even the board behind the Pulitzer Prize.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Wall Street Journal for comment on this story. Reuters reported that Dow Jones, the newspaper’s parent company, “has said it has full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of the Journal’s reporting and will vigorously defend the lawsuit.”
