Miami federal judge Darrin Gayles dismissed President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, October 31, 2026, and this time the dismissal was with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot refile the same claims in that court.
Why it matters: the ruling ends, at least in the Miami court, a case brought by a sitting president against a major American newspaper, and it turns on the high legal bar public figures must clear before a news organisation can be held liable for defamation.
Gayles wrote that the amended complaint “falls short of pleading actual malice,” the standard Trump had to meet to keep the case alive. According to the judge, the allegations about malice were “conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the Article and often irrelevant to whether Defendants knew or should have known that the statements in the Article were purportedly false.”
Gayles also said Trump was “grasping at straws” and suggested his legal team had tried “to manufacture flaws” in the Journal’s reporting. In a separate passage reported by CNN, the judge rejected Trump’s argument that the newspaper should have held the story after he denied writing the letter.
“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,” Gayles wrote, adding that such a rule would violate the First Amendment.
A spokesperson for Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, told CNN: “We’re pleased with the court’s decision.” The White House did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment, according to that report.
Trump sued Dow Jones, its parent company News Corp, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, chairman emeritus Rupert Murdoch, and Journal reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo. The lawsuit brought two defamation claims, seeking at least 10 billion dollars in damages on each claim, according to the Journal’s own account of the case.
At the centre of the dispute is a Journal article published on July 17, 2025, titled “Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump.” The article described a book of congratulatory letters compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003, which the paper said included a letter bearing Trump’s name.
That letter, as described by the Journal, contained typewritten text framed by a hand-drawn outline of a woman, with a signature at the bottom. Trump denied writing the letter, called it “a fake thing,” and accused the newspaper of knowingly publishing a false story.
Trump filed the lawsuit in federal court in Miami on July 18, 2025, one day after the article appeared, according to Al Jazeera. The suit accused the paper and its reporters of having “knowingly and recklessly” published “numerous false, defamatory, and disparaging statements” that caused him “overwhelming financial and reputational harm.”
Gayles first dismissed the case in April 2026, ruling that the original complaint came nowhere close to the actual-malice standard for a public figure. That dismissal was without prejudice, giving Trump a chance to file an amended complaint addressing the shortcomings, which he did in May.
Saturday’s ruling found that the revised complaint still failed to resolve those issues. The judge wrote that “the Court agrees that President Trump’s defamation claims lack merit,” according to the Journal’s report on its own publisher’s case.
Under American defamation law, a public figure must show that a publisher knew a statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true. That principle, from the Supreme Court’s decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, is why Gayles focused on what Trump could plead about the Journal’s state of mind.
In the April ruling, Gayles noted that the journalists had reached out to Trump, Justice Department officials and the Federal Bureau of Investigation before publication. That earlier finding undercut the argument that the paper had deliberately avoided checking Trump’s denial, the judge said at the time.
Epstein was convicted in Florida in 2008 and served 13 months in jail, and he died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while facing federal sex-trafficking charges, in a death later ruled a suicide.
Trump has pursued other defamation cases against news organisations during his second term, including a 15 billion dollar case against The New York Times and a 10 billion dollar case against the BBC over its editing of his January 6, 2021, speech. One month before taking office, he also sued Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer over a pre-election poll, and a judge dismissed that lawsuit with prejudice in September.
Legal experts quoted by CNN have described some of these lawsuits as frivolous, but warned that winning may not be the only point. The publicity and the threat of drawn-out litigation can pressure news outlets and chill aggressive reporting, they said.
Saturday’s order therefore matters beyond a single article. It closes Trump’s second attempt to sue over the Epstein birthday-letter report, leaves the Journal’s reporting standing in court, and restates a familiar limit on defamation claims by public figures: denial alone does not make publication unlawful.
