A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and its parent company over an article that linked him to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It ruled that Trump had failed to sufficiently allege that the newspaper had acted “actually maliciously” in publishing the story.
U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice and gave Trump until April 27 to file an amended version. The ruling does not address the question of whether the article was true or whether its statements were defamatory; According to the judge, questions were left for another day.
Trump filed the lawsuit in July 2025 against two of the newspaper’s reporters and several subsidiaries and parent companies. The Complaint At the center was a January 2025 article that described a letter with Trump’s name in a leather-bound birthday album that Ghislaine Maxwell put together to mark Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. The letter contained a drawing of a naked woman and text framed as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein. Trump denied writing the letter, calling it “a fake thingbefore the Journal published the story.
But Judge Gayles concluded that Trump’s allegations of malice amounted to little more than a “formulaic recitation” of legal elements, the kind of closing assertions that courts have consistently found inadequate under federal pleading standards. The judge found that the article itself showed that the Journal had contacted Trump, Justice Department officials and the FBI before publication, refuting any claim that the newspaper had intentionally avoided the truth. The judge also noted that the article contained Trump’s denials, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions, a factor that courts have found to be an impediment to establishing actual malice.
As a public figure, Trump faces steep legal hurdles set by the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. He must show that the journal published the article knowing it was false or with reckless disregard for whether it was false. This is a subjective standard that checks whether the editor actually had serious doubts about the accuracy of the story. The ruling also rejected the Journal’s attempt at this early stage to get the court to consider the birthday album and the letter itself as evidence. After Trump filed suit, a House committee Lower store garden the Epstein estate and published documents that contained a page that matched the description of the letter in the article. However, because Trump disputes the authenticity of these documents, the judge declined to consider them established facts.
Trump’s separate defamation lawsuit per quod was also dismissed because he did not allege specific financial losses. The defendants had sought attorney’s fees under Florida’s anti-SLAPP law in response to meritless claims restricting free speech. The judge denied that request without prejudice, saying the court had not yet ruled on the merits of Trump’s claims.
