Judge dismisses Trump's $10bn lawsuit against Wall Street Journal over Epstein birthday letter

A US judge has dismissed President Donald Trump's $10bn (£7.4bn) defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, describing the case as "grasping at straws" and ruling that it ran counter to the First Amendment's protection of press freedom. Trump sued the newspaper's parent company, Dow Jones, and its leader Rupert Murdoch last year after it reported on a letter allegedly written by Trump to the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The letter was said to be part of a birthday book assembled for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003, before he was charged with sex crimes. Trump has denied writing or signing the letter, which included suggestive language and a drawing of the outline of a woman's body. He and Epstein were photographed together at Mar-a-Lago in 1997. Judge Darrin Gayles had already dismissed the defamation suit once, when it sought $20bn in damages. Trump's legal team refiled the case seeking $10bn, and this time the judge threw it out "with prejudice", meaning it cannot be filed again. In a 20-page ruling, Gayles pointed to the newspaper's "thoughtful and detailed investigation" behind the story and said the lawsuit was an attempt to "manufacture flaws" in that work. He wrote that Trump's team had failed to prove the defendants made defamatory statements with "actual malice", the legal standard requiring proof that a defendant knew a statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true. Trump alleged that the letter obtained and released by the Journal, which features his signature at the bottom, was "fake", and that the defendants devised the story in order to defame him. His lawyers argued that because Trump denied writing the letter when contacted by the paper, the Journal should have disregarded everything else learned in its investigation and not published the story. Gayles rejected that reasoning, writing that it "is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment". If that were the law, he wrote, "any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press", a result he said flew in the face of the "American privilege to speak one's mind". The Journal's story about Epstein's birthday book, and the letter bearing Trump's name, appeared as the Trump administration faced intense criticism from both parties over the summer for its handling of Epstein documents. Trump had said the newspaper slandered him and violated libel laws in publishing the article. According to the Journal's report, the letter contained several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appeared to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. It reportedly included a joking reference that "enigmas never age" and ended with the words: "A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday - and may every day be another wonderful secret."