U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami dismissed with prejudice President Donald Trump’s $10bn defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and Rupert Murdoch over reporting connected to Jeffrey Epstein. The dismissal ends this version of the claim: a case dismissed with prejudice cannot be filed again. [E1][E3][E5][E6][E11]
Gayles ruled that Trump had not proved the defendants made defamatory statements with the actual malice required by law. The judge wrote that the amended complaint fell short of pleading actual malice, and described the allegations about malice as conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article and often irrelevant to what the defendants knew or should have known about purported falsity. [E8][E9]
In his 20-page ruling, Gayles found the suit ran counter to the First Amendment and said it had sought to manufacture flaws in the Journal’s reporting; he described the newspaper’s investigation as thoughtful and detailed. [E2][E4][E7] That legal finding does not decide the competing accounts of the underlying letter. The ruling noted that the Journal had reported Trump’s denial: he called the letter a fake and denied writing it. [E10]