A federal judge tossed out Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal after the newspaper published the president’s alleged birthday letter to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Obama-appointed Judge Darrin Gayles said that the president came “nowhere close” to showing the newspaper acted with actual malice toward him.
Trump, 79, had sued the publication for $10 billion after it published the letter and a drawing of a nude figure it reported he sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday.
“President Trump argues that this allegation shows that Defendants acted with serious doubts about the truth of their reporting and, therefore, with actual malice. The Court disagrees,” Gayles wrote.
“To establish actual malice, ‘a plaintiff must show the defendant deliberately avoided investigating the veracity of the statement in order to evade learning the truth,’” he continued. “The Complaint comes nowhere close to this standard.”
The judge pointed out that the WSJ went to the president, Justice Department, and FBI for comment before publishing its article and included the president’s denial.
While the judge threw out the president’s lawsuit, he left the door open for Trump’s team to refile their complaint with facts to help argue their case by April 27. Trump, on Truth Social, said his legal team would re-file an “updated lawsuit” by the deadline.
“Our powerful case against The Wall Street Journal, and other defendants, was asked to be re-filed by the Judge. It is not a termination, it is a suggested re-filing,” he said.
The Daily Beast also asked the president’s attorney for comment on the judge’s decision.
The Wall Street Journal first published the content of the letter in an article last July. It described the message as “several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair."
“Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret,” the message read.
Trump denied writing the letter, calling it “fake” and claimed he “never wrote a picture” in his life, despite there being numerous other doodles by Trump auctioned off at other points in time.
The day after the report was published, Trump sued, naming the WSJ, its reporters, the publisher Dow Jones, parent company News Corp, and executives.
But in early September, after members of the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Epstein estate for the document and it was handed over, the Wall Street Journal published a copy of the full letter with the doodle.
Dow Jones hailed the judge’s decision on Monday and stood by its reporting.
“We are pleased with the judge’s decision to dismiss this complaint. We stand behind the reliability, rigor and accuracy of The Wall Street Journal’s reporting,” a spokesperson told the Daily Beast in a statement.
