Judge dismisses Trump’s Wall Street Journal lawsuit over Epstein birthday letter story

A federal judge has dismissed Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and the journalists and publishers who reported on an alleged birthday letter to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which the president claims does not exist.

The letter — allegedly signed by Trump and featuring a sexually suggestive drawing and a birthday wish that says “may every day be another wonderful secret” — was first published by the newspaper and then shared with members of Congress by the Epstein estate last year.

Trump has repeatedly denied writing the letter and denied that a signature on the document is his. He filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit last summer claiming that “no authentic letter or drawing exists” and blasted the story as a “false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS ‘article’ in the useless ‘rag’ that is.”

In his order on Monday, Florida District Judge Darrin P. Gayles argued that Trump failed to show that the article was published with “actual malice,” the legal standard for proving defamation, and opened the door for the president to file an amended complaint.

Trump came “nowhere close to this standard,” Judge Gayles wrote. “Quite the opposite,” he said.

The president’s lawsuit alleges that he told the defendants that the letter “was a fake before they ran the article,” the judge noted in his ruling.

“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,” he wrote.

Trump’s “conclusory allegation” that the newspaper had “contradictory evidence and failed to investigate” his claims “is rebutted by the article itself “and is insufficient to establish actual malice,” the judge wrote.

In a footnote, the judge also noted that the “very existence” of the birthday letter “bears on whether the article is true and, even if it is false, whether defendants acted with actual malice.”

“President Trump will follow Judge Gayles’s ruling and guidance to refile this powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other Defendants,” a spokesperson for the president’s legal team told The Independent. “The president will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People.”

The newspaper published a 50th birthday greeting to Epstein from 2003, which included a message that said “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey” and “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” all written inside the outline of a woman’s body.

The publication of the letter joined a wave of reporting into the government’s handling of investigations into Epstein as Trump’s Department of Justice sought to draw federal probes to a close, drawing more scrutiny into the president’s relationship with the wealthy sex offender and his alleged connections to a wider network of powerful figures.

The president’s lawsuit “does not include a single plausible allegation” that The Wall Street Journal knowingly published false statements about him, lawyers for the defendants wrote in response last year.

The article is “true,” they wrote, and the evidence is publicly available for anyone to see.

“This case calls out for dismissal,” they wrote, calling Trump’s lawsuit “an affront to the First Amendment” and an attempt to “silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public.”

“By its very nature, this meritless lawsuit threatens to chill the speech of those who dare to publish content that the president does not like,” they added.

The Independent has requested comment from Trump’s legal team and spokespeople for The Wall Street Journal. The White House referred The Independent’s inquiry to the president’s counsel.

The president’s name appears thousands of times within the millions of documents released by the Justice Department as part of legislation that Trump had signed into law. Trump socialized with Epstein throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and Epstein once described himself as the president’s “closest friend.”

Trump has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing, and one’s appearance in the Epstein files does not suggest otherwise. The president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and insists he cut ties with Epstein years before the wealthy pedophile — who died by suicide in a New York City jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges — was under investigation.

The president meanwhile continues to threaten media outlets, publishers and journalists with legal action over critical coverage, and he routinely suggests he can revoke broadcast licenses for networks over their antagonistic reporting of his administration. He is embroiled in another defamation lawsuit against the BBC, which he has accused of editing his speech to a crowd on January 6, 2021.

Last year, a federal judge lambasted the president’s legal team in a scathing order dismissing the president’s $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, which the judge called “decidedly improper and impermissible.”