MIAMI — President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation case against The Wall Street Journal has been dismissed for a second time—this time with prejudice, preventing him from filing another amended version of the same lawsuit in federal district court.
U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles ruled Saturday that Trump’s revised complaint still did not plausibly show that the newspaper, its reporters or its corporate leaders published disputed claims with “actual malice,” the demanding legal standard that public figures must satisfy in defamation cases.
Why the judge ended the case
The lawsuit challenged a 2025 Journal article about a sexually suggestive letter and drawing that the newspaper said bore Trump’s name and appeared in a birthday album prepared for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Trump denied writing the letter and described the report as false and defamatory.
Gayles found that the amended complaint relied on allegations that were vague, conclusory or unrelated to whether the defendants knew the article was false or recklessly disregarded its accuracy. The judge wrote that the complaint was “grasping at straws” in attempting to identify flaws in the newspaper’s investigation, according to the Associated Press.
The ruling also emphasized that the Journal contacted Trump and other officials before publication and included Trump’s denial in the article. Reuters reported that Gayles characterized the reporting process as a detailed investigation and rejected the argument that Trump’s denial alone required the paper to abandon the story.
What “actual malice” means
In American defamation law, a public official cannot win merely by showing that a damaging statement was inaccurate. Under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the plaintiff must plausibly allege—and later prove—that the publisher knew a statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true.
Gayles concluded that Trump’s amended complaint still did not clear that threshold. The judge had dismissed the original complaint in April but allowed Trump to revise and refile it. Saturday’s dismissal with prejudice closes that path at the trial-court level.
An appeal could still follow
A dismissal with prejudice prevents another version of the complaint from being filed in the same case, but it does not eliminate Trump’s right to appeal. A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said the president would continue pursuing the matter, and CBS News reported that an appeal is expected.
Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher, said it was pleased with the court’s decision. The defendants included Dow Jones, News Corp., Rupert Murdoch, chief executive Robert Thomson and the reporters who wrote the disputed article.
The dispute behind the lawsuit
The Journal reported that the letter was collected for an album marking Epstein’s 50th birthday. Trump has consistently denied creating or signing it. The court’s ruling did not decide who authored the letter; it addressed whether Trump’s complaint adequately alleged that the defendants published the story with the constitutionally required level of fault.
That distinction is central to the decision. Gayles did not rule that every factual claim in the Journal’s report had been conclusively proven. He ruled that the complaint did not plausibly allege actual malice, especially given the reporting steps described and the publication of Trump’s denial.
Why the ruling matters
The decision reinforces the high barrier elected officials and other public figures face when suing news organizations. That standard is designed to protect robust reporting and debate about powerful people while still allowing claims to proceed when evidence supports knowing or reckless falsehood.
For Trump, the ruling ends his second attempt to keep this particular complaint alive in district court. The next legal question is whether his attorneys ask a federal appeals court to reverse Gayles’ decision.
Sources
- Associated Press: Judge dismisses Trump’s Wall Street Journal lawsuit
- Reuters: Trump’s second attempt to sue the Journal is dismissed
- CBS News: Lawsuit dismissed with prejudice
