A Florida federal judge has tossed out a high-profile defamation lawsuit brought by former President and current 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump against the Wall Street Journal, its parent company News Corp, and media magnate Rupert Murdoch, stemming from a 2024 report linking Trump to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The dismissal opens the door for Trump to refile an amended complaint, setting the stage for a continued legal battle over the controversial reporting.
Trump first launched the suit last summer, demanding no less than $10 billion in damages over the Journal’s exclusive July 17 report. The story centered on a handwritten entry in a 2003 birthday book presented to Epstein, which the outlet claimed included Trump’s name and a crude drawing of a woman’s body. The former president has long maintained the entry is a fabrication, arguing the publication’s claims amounted to damaging defamation that tarnished his reputation.
In his 12-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles made clear that Trump failed to meet the stringent legal standard required to proceed with a defamation claim brought by a public figure. Under longstanding U.S. defamation law, public figures must prove a news outlet acted with “actual malice” — meaning the organization either knew the reporting was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth — to win a damages claim. Gayles wrote that Trump had come “nowhere close” to satisfying this high legal threshold, and that the former president had not plausibly alleged the Journal published the story with malicious intent.
Crucially, the judge dismissed the case without prejudice, a procedural ruling that allows Trump to submit an amended, corrected lawsuit by the court’s April 27 deadline. In response to the ruling, a lawyer for Trump told CBS News — the U.S. news partner of the BBC — that the former president intends to refile what he called a “powerhouse” amended suit. The legal team added that Trump remains committed to “hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People.”
The reporting at the center of the case has been a flashpoint in national conversations about Trump’s long-rumored ties to Epstein, the wealthy financier who died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. Weeks after the Journal published its original report, Democratic lawmakers released an image of the handwritten birthday note to the public on social media, ahead of the scheduled release of a trove of sealed court documents related to Epstein’s case. Though the Journal never published the image itself, the details of the outlet’s description of the note matched the image released by lawmakers. Trump has repeatedly denied writing the entry, calling it a “fake thing” fabricated to hurt his political standing.