A federal judge on Monday tossed convicted felon President Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and owner Rupert Murdoch over the paper’s publication of Donald’s affectionate 2003 birthday letter to notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Southern Florida District Judge Darrin Gayles found that Trump had “not plausibly alleged that the Defendants published the Article with actual malice,” which is one way to describe a case that stood on, in the actual words of Team Orange’s Michael Brito, “the defendants’ reliance on a purported letter released over a month after the complaint was filed proves that defendants did not actually possess, or even review, any purported letter before publishing the false and defamatory article.”
Those words alone, deranged as they may be, actually undersell the batshittery of the whole timeline: It was July 17th, 2025 that the Journal printed the text of the letter that they did not yet have in their possession, and the complaint was filed less than 24 hours later. On September 8th, the House Oversight Committee acquired the actual letter from Epstein’s estate and, in a fun little fuck you to Trump, gave it to the Wall Street Journal first. It was a month and a half later that Brito told the court that it was still defamation because they didn’t have the letter yet in July.