Judge dismisses Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit over Jeffrey Epstein birthday card story

A federal judge in Florida has dismissed a revised version of President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over an article about a birthday card he allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein more than two years ago. decades ago.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that Trump’s amended complaint suffered from the same fatal flaw as his first attempt: It fell far short of meeting the high legal bar to demonstrate that the newspaper published the article with “actual malice.”

“Because President Trump has not plausibly alleged that each Defendant made defamatory statements with actual malice, the Amended Complaint must be dismissed. And because this is President Trump’s second attempt to assert his allegations, the Court finds that dismissal with prejudice is appropriate,” the judge wrote.

Trump first sued the newspaper last July, shortly after the Journal published a story about a birthday book that Ghislaine Maxwell had put together for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. The book appeared to include a card from Trump, who was friends with Epstein at that time.

The card contained the hand-drawn outline of a nude woman with what appeared to be Trump’s first name signed in the pubic area. It included a typewritten note depicting an imaginary conversation with Epstein, who would later be accused of sex trafficking.

Trump denied having anything to do with the card, and his complaint accused the newspaper of making it up and that no such note existed.

Epstein’s estate later released a copy of a map matching the Journal’s description. Trump and the White House claim the document is a fake.

Trump’s suit alleged that the authors of the article “falsely represented as fact that President Trump had drawn the naked woman’s breasts and signed his name ‘Donald’ below her waist, ‘imitating pubic hair'”, and that the article caused him “crushing financial and reputational harm.”

Trump’s lawsuit also criticized the newspaper for not publishing an image of the map in the initial article, saying it shows “no authentic letter or drawing exists” — even though the House Oversight Committee made the map public after obtaining it from Epstein’s estate.

The suit says the Journal should have known the story was false because Trump said it wasn’t true. He also criticized the newspaper for not interviewing Epstein co-conspirator Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking. The article said Journal reporters wrote him a letter requesting an interview and including a comment from his lawyer.

The newspaper’s lawyers argued that, like the original lawsuit, Trump’s revised lawsuit fell “far” from demonstrating that the newspaper acted with actual malice, in which “the false statement was made with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Despite Trump’s claim that the newspaper failed to properly investigate the map before publishing the article, “the article itself established that the Journal not only investigated” but also “informed readers that President Trump called the letter false and denied writing it,” the newspaper said in its motion to dismiss the suit.

Moreover, the lawyers argued, alleging that someone sending a birthday card to another person is not defamatory.

“There is nothing inherently defamatory about sending a bawdy letter to a friend,” the lawyers wrote, and the article “emphasizes that the birthday book was created before Epstein’s first arrest” and “makes clear that President Trump’s friendship with Epstein ended years before Epstein was charged with sex crimes.”

The attorneys also argued that the complaint should be dismissed because the publication of the map showed the story to be “substantially true.”

In an interview last year with Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, Maxwell acknowledged putting together the birthday book but said she didn’t remember whether Trump had a hand in it.

The White House maintains the signature is not Trump’s and is different from his distinctive full signature. Democrats have compiled a number of documents in which Trump signed only his first name over the course of the year, and the signatures appear very similar to the one on the card.