A Federal Judge Threw Out Trump's $10 Billion Defamation Suit Against the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch, and Dow Jones Over Their Story About a Lewd 2003 Birthday Letter to Jeffrey Epstein Bearing Trump's Name — This Time Dismissing It With Prejudice So It Cannot Be Refiled — and Wrote That the President Was "Grasping at Straws," Calling His Legal Team's Ghislaine Maxwell References a "Red Herring"
On October 31, 2026, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami dismissed — for the second time, and this time with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled — Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, its owner Rupert Murdoch, and Dow Jones. The suit targeted the Journal's reporting on a lewd 2003 letter, bearing Trump's name, prepared for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday, which Trump denies writing. Gayles found that Trump had failed to show the reporting was published with "actual malice" — the demanding constitutional standard a public figure must meet to win a defamation case — and he did not spare the president's lawyering: he wrote that Trump was "grasping at straws," suggested the legal team had tried to manufacture flaws in the Journal's investigation, and dismissed the complaint's references to Ghislaine Maxwell as a "red herring." The judge had already tossed an earlier version in the spring, giving Trump a chance to refile, which he did; this time there is no second chance. Trump says he will appeal. The failure here is twofold: a sitting president using a $10 billion lawsuit to try to punish a newspaper for reporting on his Epstein ties, and a court finding the effort so legally empty that it ended it permanently with a rebuke attached.