Kathrine Frich
The president originally sued for $20 billion before Judge Gayles tossed that first complaint in April.
When someone takes a fight to court, they usually hope for a quick win or a quiet settlement.
Pouring time and money into a legal battle always carries the risk of walking away empty-handed.
This weekend, one massive courtroom gamble came to a permanent end.
Thrown out for good
In Miami on Saturday, US District Judge Darrin Gayles threw out Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch.
According to the Daily Express, the judge dismissed the case “with prejudice”, which means the president cannot refile it.
The legal fight started over an investigative story the newspaper published last year about wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Ghislaine Maxwell collected a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump’s name for Epstein’s 50th birthday album in 2003, years before the two men fell out.
According to the newspaper, the note sat inside the hand-drawn outline of a naked woman and ended with the line, “Happy Birthday, and may every day be another wonderful secret”. Trump insisted he never wrote the message, calling the article “false, malicious and defamatory”.
Grasping at straws
The president originally sued for $20 billion before Judge Gayles tossed that first complaint in April.
When Trump tried again in May with a $10 billion price tag, he claimed the paper caused “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” by “knowingly and recklessly” printing lies.
Judge Gayles was not convinced. Pointing to a 1964 Supreme Court rule that requires public figures to prove a publisher knowingly lied, his Saturday ruling said the lawsuit was “grasping at straws” as it tried to “manufacture” mistakes in the journalism.
“The amended complaint falls short of pleading actual malice,” Judge Gayles wrote, as quoted by the Daily Express.
“Indeed, the allegations regarding malice are conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article, and often irrelevant to whether defendants knew or should have known that the statements in the article were purportedly false.”
More media battles
The judge also pointed out that the newspaper gave fair play to the president’s side of the story. “Rather, it informed readers that President Trump decried the Letter as a fake and denied writing it,” Judge Gayles noted in the ruling.
Losing the case marks a fresh setback in the president’s wider war with the press, which he regularly labels “fake news”.
According to the Daily Express, Trump is still locked in legal battles with the BBC and the Associated Press, while CNN, MS Now, and Politico are suing him after he barred them from the White House in mid-September.
