President Donald Trump is turning to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell as he resurrects his lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over an article about a lewd birthday letter bearing his signature sent to Jeffrey Epstein.
The president refiled his $10 billion lawsuit on Wednesday after a federal judge threw out his first lawsuit in April, finding he had not sufficiently alleged “actual malice,” the legal threshold required in defamation suits involving public officials.
In the revised lawsuit, Trump’s lawyers argue that the Journal showed actual malice by omitting from the article Maxwell’s claim that she had no recollection of Trump sending the letter, citing testimony from her controversial sit-down last July with then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
“Indeed, Maxwell has stated, subject to penalty of perjury for lying to a federal officer, that she did not remember President Trump submitting a letter for Epstein’s 50th birthday,” the president’s lawsuit states.
But in the original Journal article about the letter, which Trump allegedly sent to Epstein for a birthday album Maxwell compiled for the pedophile’s birthday in 2003, the reporters wrote that Maxwell didn’t respond to a letter requesting an interview sent to her in prison.
Moreover, Maxwell’s sit-down with Blanche, now the acting attorney general, did not occur until a week after the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper published the article about the letter.
Still, Trump’s lawsuit claims that the Journal intentionally left out the information to smear him. To establish actual malice, Trump, 79, needs to prove that the Journal either published statements its reporters and editors knew were false, or that they otherwise acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth.
Maxwell’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When reached for comment, the White House referred the Daily Beast to Trump’s personal lawyers, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The president’s lawyers claim that the Journal and its reporters “either interviewed or consulted with Maxwell about the birthday card and intentionally failed to report what she told them (which is that she had no recollection that Plaintiff signed and delivered a birthday card), or simply avoided and ignored communicating with her about the false, malicious, and defamatory statements that they ultimately published, despite their professed knowledge of Maxwell’s involvement in collecting the letters from Trump and dozens of Epstein’s other associates.”
They also argue that the Journal acted with actual malice by failing to explain how it obtained the letter or to verify its contents.
During Blanche’s interview with Maxwell, which took place over nine hours, he asked her, “Do you remember President Trump submitting a letter or a card or a note?”
“I don’t,” Maxwell, now 64, replied. She also said that she does not remember any specific names of individuals who contributed to the album.
The sit-down has drawn suspicion from the public, not least because Maxwell was inexplicably transferred to a low-security prison, Federal Prison Camp Bryan, known as “Club Fed,” last year, just one week after speaking with Blanche, despite a longstanding DOJ policy barring sex offenders from such relatively lax facilities.
Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking and other charges for recruiting and grooming teenagers for Epstein between 1999 and 2007. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022.
