A federal judge in Florida seemed skeptical of arguments from Donald Trump’s legal team on Wednesday over whether the court should allow a $10bn defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal to move forward.
Trump sued the Journal and the News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch over a July 2025 article about a “bawdy” letter reportedly from Trump that was included in a 2003 birthday book for disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Trump has denied authoring or signing the letter, and his attorneys have argued that the Journal published the story despite having been told it was false.
US district court judge Darrin P Gayles initially dismissed the case in April, arguing that Trump’s attorneys had not sufficiently pleaded actual malice, the legal standard needed to win a defamation case, but he gave Trump an opportunity to refile the lawsuit. The president’s legal team refiled the suit in May.
Representing the president, attorney Alejandro Brito, who is also handling the president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit against the BBC, argued that the Journal “didn’t follow journalistic standards sufficient to making the claims”.
“The defendants did not and could not have [done] the investigations to make the definitive statements in this article,” Brito said in a Miami courtroom on Wednesday.
Furthermore, he said that only four people could attest to the veracity of the letter: Trump, who has denied it; Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019; the bookbinder, who is also deceased; and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who said she does not recall who participated in the birthday book project.
But the judge seemed particularly skeptical that Trump was financially harmed by the Journal’s publication, saying his lawyer’s claims seemed “rather conclusory”.
Brito responded that Trump’s team did not need to specify financial harm and had “done enough at this stage”.
Lawyers representing Murdoch, the Journal and parent company News Corp argued that Trump’s team had made no headway in their attempts to prove that the president was defamed by the story, headlined “Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump.”
“The amended complaint is no better than the original complaint,” said Andrew J Levander, an attorney representing the defendants. “It is time for this baseless lawsuit to come to an end. You gave the plaintiff a roadmap to fix this case and he couldn’t do it.”
Lawyers for the defendants argued that Trump’s legal team mischaracterized the article and that the Journal could not be expected, as a matter of journalistic prerogative, to refrain from publishing an article simply because of the president’s denial.
Katherine M Bolger, an attorney representing the defendants, argued that their case was actually bolstered by the Journal’s decision to include Trump’s denials – and that the reporters who authored the story, Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo, were careful to tell readers “what they know and what they don’t know”.
“That’s not actual malice – that’s good journalism,” Bolger said.
While Gayles did not issue a ruling from the bench, he indicated at the end of the 90-minute hearing that one would soon be coming. He also agreed to stay discovery in the case.
Levander, the attorney for the Journal, argued that given Trump’s history of suing media companies, “if we get into discovery, it will be burdensome on the court and it will be burdensome on the Wall Street Journal.”
