Florida Federal Judge Dismisses Trump’s Defamation Claims Against WSJ over Epstein Birthday Card

A federal judge in Florida has dismissed President Trump’s lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, in which he claimed to have been defamed by the paper’s reporting about a note it said Trump had provided for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday celebration. The ruling was issued by Judge Darrin P. Gayles, an Obama appointee to the federal district court in South Florida, in a 17-page order on Monday.

The WSJ story, published just three days before Trump began his second (non-consecutive term) in January 2025, alleged that Trump and dozens of other Epstein friends and associates had been asked to contribute birthday wishes by Ghislaine Maxwell, who compiled them into a leather-bound volume to mark the occasion. Epstein turned 50 in 2003, well before his first arrest, in 2006, on charges related to sex with underage girls.

Epstein, of course, committed suicide while in federal custody in 2019, following his federal indictment on sex trafficking charges in 2019. Maxwell, his former paramour and coconspirator was later convicted on sex-trafficking charges and is serving a 20-year sentence. Trump claims that he and Epstein had a falling out before Epstein’s 2006 Florida arrest for procuring minors to engage in prostitution.

As Judge Gayles summarized, excerpting the WSJ report:

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 letter concludes: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

The WSJ noted that it had contacted the now-president prior to publication and reported his vehement denial that he had written the letter:

This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story. . . . I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women. . . . It’s not my language. It’s not my words.

The paper said he also vowed to “sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else” if it published the article (which it did shortly after seeking comment).

The court concluded that Trump’s complaint “comes nowhere close” to satisfying the Supreme Court’s stringent defamation standard, which requires a plaintiff to establish “actual malice” — meaning, “a plaintiff must show the defendant deliberately avoided investigating the veracity of the statement in order to evade learning the truth.”

Gayle elaborated that the WSJ had contacted the president, the Justice Department, and the FBI to seek comment, and had published Trump’s denial. (The DOJ and FBI did not respond to the paper’s inquiry.) Obviously, the WSJ reporters attempted to investigate the letter.

According to the court, the president offered no support for his conclusory claim that the WSJ had contradictory evidence that it ignored. Trump was also flatly wrong in claiming that the report did not explain whether the WSJ reporters had seen the letter in question; as recounted in the above excerpt, the article explicitly says that the letter “was reviewed by the Journal.” The president offered no basis to question that assertion.

In a social media post this afternoon, the president stated:

Our powerful case against The Wall Street Journal, and other defendants, was asked to be re-filed by the Judge. It is not a termination, it is a suggested re-filing, and we will be, as per the Order, re-filing an updated lawsuit on or before April 27th. President DONALD J. TRUMP

This is wrong. Judge Gayles did not ask that the president refile the suit.

First, the judge found that, because Trump failed to establish actual malice, it would be premature to address the WSJ’s factual claims that the statements in the article are true and, as a matter of law, not defamatory. Those claims are likely to be revisited.

Furthermore, after dismantling the president’s paltry, “implausible” showing on actual malice, Gayles heeded precedent holding that a dismissal based on a failure to plead adequate facts “should be without prejudice,” such that the plaintiff has an opportunity to amend the complaint with supplemental facts.

Gayles was not asking Trump to supplement his allegations; he was merely stating the unremarkable principle that if Trump has additional facts at his disposal that could establish actual malice, the law gives him the opportunity to try to do that.

In addition (and unmentioned in the president’s post), Gayles tabled the WSJ’s request for attorneys’ fees and costs, which the paper bases on the theory that Trump’s lawsuit is patently meritless and was brought to penalize the WSJ for exercising its free speech rights. The judge said the WSJ could renew that request after the April 27 deadline for Trump to file an amended complaint. If Gayles believed that the president’s suit had any merit, there would be no reason to defer consideration of the request for attorneys’ fees and costs; the court would simply have denied the request with prejudice.

We will see if the president tries to amend his complaint by pleading facts that truly indicate actual malice. If Trump’s lawyers were aware of such facts, it’s difficult to understand how those facts were not included in the original complaint. After all, without them, there’s no prayer of a successful defamation case.