Judge Dismisses Trump's $10 Billion Wall Street Journal Lawsuit Again — This Time for Good

A federal judge on Saturday dismissed President Trump's defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal for a second time — and this time closed the door on it. U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles, based in Miami, dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning the president cannot file it again, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press reported.

Trump sued over the Journal's 2025 report that a book given to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003 included a letter with typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman and signed 'Donald.' He brought two defamation claims against Dow Jones, its parent company News Corp, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson and Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, and two Journal reporters, asking for at least $10 billion in damages in each claim, the Journal reported.

Gayles found the president had not established a viable claim that the Journal published the report with actual malice, the standard a public figure must meet to prove defamation. Trump's allegations, the judge said as the Journal reported his ruling, 'are conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article, and often irrelevant' to the malice argument. 'The Court agrees that President Trump's defamation claims lack merit,' Gayles wrote. Gayles, an appointee of President Barack Obama, had dismissed an earlier version of the lawsuit in April but allowed Trump to refile it; Saturday's ruling ends the case at the trial court.

The dismissal is the second legal setback in the file this year and lands in the final weekend before Tuesday's midterm elections. The accounts read by the desk this cycle carried no response from the president or his lawyers, and this story will be updated if one is issued.