A federal judge in Miami on Saturday dismissed with prejudice President Donald Trump’s amended defamation lawsuit against media baron Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal over the newspaper’s reporting on a purported 50th birthday letter from the president to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
District Court Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that Trump had again failed to plausibly allege the newspaper and other defendants acted with actual malice when they published the story in July 2025.
“As with his first attempt, he has failed,” Gayles wrote in the 20-page ruling, which came more than six months after he dismissed Trump’s first version of the suit. “Grasping at straws, the Amended Complaint attempts to manufacture flaws with the investigation.”
By dismissing the suit with prejudice, the judge blocked Trump from filing another suit alleging the same claims about Murdoch and the paper in federal court.
Gayles said the Journal had conducted a “thoughtful and detailed investigation,” and he rejected Trump’s argument that the newspaper should not have published the story after he denied writing the letter.
The judge did not determine whether Trump actually authored the disputed letter. Trump has adamantly denied writing it.
When Galyes first dismissed the suit in April, he allowed Trump to file an amended version of the complaint to cure legal defects the judge had identified.
Trump was seeking $10 billion in damages from Murdoch and the Journal, which is owned by Murdoch’s News Corp.
A spokesperson for the newspaper’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., in a statement to CNBC on Saturday, said, “We’re pleased with the court’s decision.”
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team confirmed to CNBC that the president plans to appeal the ruling.
“President Trump will continue to press forward in his powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other defendants,” the spokesman said in a statement. “The President will continue to hold those who mislead the American People with Fake News and smears accountable for their actions.”
Gayles, as he did when dismissing the suit for the first time, noted Trump, who has adamantly denied sending the letter to his then-friend Epstein in 2003, had “not plausibly alleged that the Defendants published the Article with actual malice.”
Plaintiffs who are public figures like Trump must show a defendant acted with actual malice when making allegedly defamatory statements, according to Supreme Court decisions that Gayles cited at the beginning of his ruling.
Trump’s amended lawsuit contained new details and claims, including that Murdoch told the president “I will handle it” during a phone conversation they had about an article describing a birthday letter to Epstein that allegedly bore Trump’s signature, Newsweek previously reported.
Gayles rejected each of Trump’s arguments in the amended complaint, including that the Journal did not adequately investigate the letter, omitted relevant details, and that the article was published after the president and his representatives denied it was authentic.
Gayles said that accepting that last argument would effectively allow public figures to block unfavorable reporting, which “runs afoul of the First Amendment” that protects freedom of speech and the press.
Saturday’s ruling is the latest setback in litigation between Trump and the media.
Another federal judge in Miami on Oct. 22 ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC by Dec. 11.
The Journal’s article on July 17, 2025, said a letter bearing Trump’s signature was included in an album of letters Epstein was giving for his 50th birthday.
The article said Trump sent the letter at the request of Epstein’s close friend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who two decades later was convicted of procuring underage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.
The Journal noted that the letter “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,” Journal reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo said in the article.
“The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,'” they wrote.
Trump angrily denied writing the letter, saying, “This is not me. This is a fake thing.”‘
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” the president said at the time.
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