President Donald Trump’s defamation case against The Wall Street Journal ended on Saturday when a federal judge in Miami threw it out for good, according to Mediaite. The suit grew out of a story the paper published about a letter Trump allegedly added to a birthday album made for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.
Judge Darrin P. Gayles issued the dismissal with prejudice. That ruling means Trump has no option to bring the same claim back to court. Courts have now stopped the lawsuit on two separate occasions.
An earlier version of the case was rejected in April. At that point, the judge allowed Trump to submit a revised complaint if he chose to continue.
Judge says actual malice was not shown
Gayles explained in a 20-page decision that Trump failed to show “actual malice.” In an earlier order, the same judge had already written that the president came “nowhere close” to proving the paper defamed him.
Trump brought the action in federal court in Miami in July of last year. Named as defendants were Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, and the two reporters who wrote the story, Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo. This is not the first time Trump has taken a media outlet to court, as seen in his $475 million lawsuit against CNN.
Their article described an album put together for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. According to the report, Trump contributed a letter that contained a lewd drawing.
The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy – like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
The album also included an imaginary conversation written as if it took place between Trump and Epstein. Trump has said he never drew the picture and never wrote the birthday note.
When the story first appeared, he labeled the message “fake.” He further called the newspaper a “disgusting and filthy rag.” The Journal, however, said it had notified Trump two days before publishing the story.
Trump and Epstein were once friends. Epstein died in 2019 of an apparent suicide while he was facing sex-trafficking charges. Ghislaine Maxwell, his former girlfriend and longtime associate, is now serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking; the Department of Justice said she carried out the offenses in coordination with Epstein.
Some of Trump’s strongest supporters criticized him after he described claims that Epstein trafficked girls for other high-profile people as a “hoax.” When the Department of Justice later released related files, many of them heavily redacted, it stated that Epstein had only ever sex-trafficked girls for himself.
Published: Nov 1, 2026 04:00 am