A federal judge in Miami has knocked out President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, ruling that the complaint did not meet the high bar required to show the paper acted with malicious intent. U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles dismissed the case without prejudice, which means Trump gets another shot at rewriting and refiling it. The lawsuit stems from a Journal article that zeroed in on a 2003 birthday note linked to Jeffrey Epstein and materials later turned over to Congress.
Judge says legal attack did not clear the malice bar
In an order from the Southern District of Florida, Gayles found that Trump had not plausibly alleged that the Journal acted with the “actual malice” public figures must prove to win a defamation case, and dismissed the suit while still allowing an amended complaint, according to The Associated Press. The ruling halts this version of the lawsuit, but it does not shut the courthouse door if Trump can come back with a more detailed filing.
What the Journal put in print
The Wall Street Journal’s July 17, 2025 story reported that a letter in a 2003 birthday album appeared to be from Trump and included a drawing and a handwritten line that read, “happy birthday, and may every day be another wonderful secret,” as described by The New York Times. That “birthday book” was later produced to Congress by lawyers for Epstein’s estate, and those same materials became a key part of the legal tug-of-war over whether the article accurately portrayed Trump’s connection to the note.
Defendants lean on the paper trail
Dow Jones, Rupert Murdoch and the reporters Trump named in the suit moved to dismiss the case and asked the court to take judicial notice of public records, including the House Oversight Committee’s production of the birthday album, arguing that those documents backed up their reporting. Court filings and a case summary compiled by the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse show the defendants filed both a motion to dismiss and a request for judicial notice last fall.
Trump pushes back and vows to refile
Trump has denied writing the note and has blasted the reporting as false. His legal team said the president would refile “this powerhouse lawsuit,” The New York Times reports. For now, though, Gayles’s order sends the case back into procedural wrangling rather than resolving who actually penned the message in that birthday album.
What happens next
Because the case was dismissed without prejudice, Trump can seek leave to file an amended complaint, but any new version will still have to clear the steep “actual malice” hurdle that applies to public figures. Legal analysts say the ruling is likely to spark more rounds of motions and discovery fights before the central factual issues, including who authored the note, are tested at a later stage, according to The Associated Press.
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