A Miami judge throws out Trump's 10 billion dollar suit against The Wall Street Journal for good

The case has now been dismissed twice, and the second dismissal closes the door the first one left open. In April, Judge Darrin Gayles threw out an earlier version of the suit but allowed Trump to refile it. The amended case came back, and on Saturday the judge dismissed it with prejudice. In plain terms, the district court is done with it, and any further fight would have to go to an appeals court.

Gayles, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, put the problem in one sentence. Trump's allegations, he wrote, are conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article, and often irrelevant to his argument that the Journal published its 2025 report with actual malice. Actual malice is the standard a public figure has to meet in an American defamation case, proof that the publisher knew the story was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true. The judge wrote that the court agrees Trump's defamation claims lack merit.

The report at the center of the case was published in July 2025. The Journal reported 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, bearing Trump's name. Trump sued the next day, bringing two defamation claims against Dow Jones, its parent News Corp, News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson, Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch and two Journal reporters, and asking for at least 10 billion dollars in damages on each claim.

Nothing in the ruling endorses the Journal's reporting, and nothing in it was a trial of what happened in 2003. The ruling is about what the complaint itself alleged and whether those allegations could carry a defamation claim against a news organization under the actual malice standard. The judge decided they could not, and decided it in a form that does not invite a third attempt in his courtroom.