By David Oscar Markus
Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed President Trump’s defamation case against the Wall Street Journal on Friday with prejudice. Here's the Order.
The suit was over the Journal’s July 2025 story about the birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump says he didn’t write it. He sued Dow Jones, News Corp., Rupert Murdoch, Robert Thomson, and the two reporters.
The order opens with New York Times v. Sullivan: “fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government.”
Trump’s main theory was that his denial should have stopped the story. The court didn’t buy it:
“In effect, President Trump argues that once he declared the Letter a ‘fake,’ Defendants should have disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story. But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment.” (p. 15)
If that were the law, the court said, “any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press.” (p. 15) The Journal had also printed the denial, in Trump’s own words.
On the attacks against the reporting itself: “Grasping at straws, the Amended Complaint attempts to manufacture flaws with the investigation.” (p. 16) The court called the Journal’s work “a thoughtful and detailed investigation.” (p. 15)
Trump also leaned on the Journal’s follow-up piece comparing signatures, arguing his signature “could not be more different” from the one on the letter. The court pointed out that the same piece “contains several examples where President Trump’s actual signature and sketches are similar to those in the Letter.” (p. 18)
