A federal judge in Miami on Saturday, October 31, 2026, dismissed President Donald Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal with prejudice — the strongest form of dismissal, which bars the president from refiling the same claims in the trial court. U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles ruled in a 20-page order that Trump's amended complaint had failed to plausibly allege that the Journal, its publisher Dow Jones, parent company News Corp, owner Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson and reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo acted with 'actual malice' when they reported on a purported 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump's name.
Source: Reuters, reported by Editor & Publisher
The judge's language was unsparing. According to the Associated Press account of the ruling, Gayles wrote that the lawsuit was 'grasping at straws' and was trying to 'manufacture' flaws in the Journal's investigation. 'As with his first attempt, he has failed,' the judge wrote, concluding that Trump's 'defamation claims lack merit.' Trump may still appeal the dismissal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, but he cannot simply fix the complaint and file it again in Miami.
Source: Associated Press, via The Oldham Times
What the judge decided — and what he pointedly did not
The case turned on the 'actual malice' standard from the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan: a public figure suing for defamation must show the publisher knew the reporting was false or recklessly disregarded whether it was true. Gayles found Trump's amended complaint offered only vague and conclusory allegations on that point, some of them inconsistent with the article itself. 'In effect, President Trump argues that once he declared the Letter a “fake,” Defendants should have disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story,' the judge wrote. Gayles expressly declined to decide whether the letter is authentic or whether the Journal's reporting was true — those factual questions, he said, were not necessary to throw the case out.
The 2003 birthday letter at the centre of the case
The lawsuit grew out of a July 2025 Journal story by Safdar and Palazzolo reporting that a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump's name was included in a leather-bound album that Ghislaine Maxwell assembled for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. As the Journal described it, the letter's text — a typewritten imagined dialogue between Trump and Epstein, including the line 'We have certain things in common' — was framed by the outline of a hand-drawn naked woman and ended: 'Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.' Epstein, the disgraced financier, was first arrested in 2006 and died in jail in 2019 while facing federal sex-trafficking charges; Maxwell is serving a prison sentence for her role in his abuse scheme.
Source: Associated Press, via The Oldham Times
Trump denied writing or signing the letter, calling the story 'false, malicious and defamatory' and the letter itself 'a fake thing.' He sued the day the story appeared in the Journal's print edition, alleging the defendants had 'knowingly and recklessly' published false statements that caused him 'overwhelming financial and reputational harm.' In September 2025, the Journal published the letter in full, including what appears to be Trump's signature — a step the paper took while the lawsuit was already under way.
Source: TheWrap
A case dismissed twice
The procedural history explains why Saturday's ruling is final at this level. Trump filed the case in July 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, where it is docketed as Trump v. Dow Jones & Co., No. 1:25-cv-23232. In April 2026, Judge Gayles dismissed the original complaint for falling short on actual malice but gave the president's lawyers until April 27 to try again with an amended complaint. The Journal filed its motion to dismiss that amended version in June. Saturday's order grants that motion — and this time the dismissal is with prejudice, closing the trial-court door entirely.
Source: TheWrap
A dismissal with prejudice is a final judgment on the claims: the same lawsuit cannot be refiled or amended again in the same court. Trump's remaining route is an appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, which reviews the judge's legal reasoning rather than hearing the case fresh.
What happens next: an appeal window and a fight over legal fees
Two tracks now run in parallel. First, the appeal: the president's team can ask the Eleventh Circuit to revive the case, arguing Gayles applied the actual-malice standard too strictly. Second, the money: the Journal's side has asked the court to make Trump pay its attorneys' fees and costs under anti-SLAPP laws — statutes designed to stop lawsuits that target speech on matters of public concern. Gayles did not award fees on Saturday, saying a threshold question — whether Florida or New York law governs the fee request — is unresolved. The defendants have 30 days to file a motion addressing that issue. The first wire reports of the ruling did not include a comment from the White House or from Dow Jones.
Source: TheWrap
Why it matters beyond one lawsuit: sitting U.S. presidents rarely sue news organisations, and this case was watched as a test of how far a president can push libel law against reporting he calls fake. Saturday's answer from the trial court is that a denial alone does not make a story defamatory — a public figure must still plausibly show the publisher knew the story was false or recklessly ignored the truth. The Journal's reporting remains published and unretracted, and the judge made no finding that the letter was genuine or fake. For readers following the long-running Epstein document disclosures, the ruling changes the legal landscape around the reporting, not the underlying documents themselves.