A federal judge in Miami has thrown out Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal — this time for good. In a 20-page order issued on Saturday, US District Judge Darrin P. Gayles dismissed the president’s amended complaint with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot refile the same claims in that court.
The lawsuit grew out of a July 2025 Journal report about a bawdy birthday letter bearing Trump’s name, included in an album assembled for the 50th birthday in 2003 of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in 2019. Trump has always denied writing the letter. Days after the story appeared, he sued the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones; its parent company, News Corp; News Corp chairman emeritus Rupert Murdoch and chief executive Robert Thomson; and the two reporters on the story, Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo. Each of his two defamation claims sought at least $10 billion in damages.
Gayles had already dismissed the original complaint in April, ruling that it came nowhere close to the legal standard for a public figure — but he gave Trump a chance to try again. The revised complaint, the judge found on Saturday, did not fix the problem.
“The Court agrees that President Trump’s defamation claims lack merit,” Gayles wrote. He described the allegations of malice as “conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article, and often irrelevant” to whether the Journal knew, or should have known, that its reporting was false. “As with his first attempt, he has failed,” he added.
That question — what Trump had to prove — sits at the heart of the case. Under the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a public figure suing for defamation must show “actual malice”: that the publisher knew the statement was false, or recklessly ignored whether it was true. A denial, on its own, is not enough.
Gayles rejected Trump’s argument that the Journal should have held the story once he denied writing the letter, saying such a rule would violate the First Amendment. “Were that the law, any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press,” he wrote. The order also criticised the lawsuit as “grasping at straws” in trying to manufacture flaws in the Journal’s investigation.
One point the ruling does not settle is worth stating plainly: the judge did not decide whether Trump wrote the letter, or whether the Journal’s reporting was accurate. The case failed on the pleading standard — on whether the complaint plausibly alleged actual malice — not on the truth of the underlying story. The full text of the order is available in the court’s published ruling.
What happens next is narrower than before. Trump can still appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and a spokesman for his legal team said he would do so. But he cannot simply file a third version of the same complaint in the trial court. The judge also gave the defendants 30 days to ask the court to make Trump pay their attorneys’ fees, under state laws designed to protect defendants sued for speaking on public issues.
Dow Jones said it was pleased with the decision. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump has pursued several high-profile media lawsuits since returning to office, including a separate BBC case in which a US magistrate recently ordered him to sit for a sworn deposition by December 11 or risk dismissal — a case covered here on Informopedia. Saturday’s ruling is the first of those fights to end with a final dismissal at trial-court level.
Why this matters beyond the United States. The actual-malice rule is an American doctrine, but its logic travels. Wherever powerful figures sue newsrooms, the practical question is the same: does a denial, or a claim of reputational harm, get to stop a story before readers see it? Gayles’s answer — that it does not, and that a lawsuit must show a publisher knowingly or recklessly printed falsehood — is a reminder of how high the bar is for turning a disputed news report into a courtroom defeat for the press. For editors and reporters everywhere, that bar is part of what makes it possible to publish uncomfortable stories about the powerful at all.
