The Ruling On Saturday
A federal judge in Miami on Saturday, October 31, 2026, dismissed President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, its publisher Dow Jones, its parent company News Corp, media executive Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, and two Journal reporters, ending the case in that court for the second time and, this time, closing the door to another amended complaint. United States District Judge Darrin P. Gayles dismissed the amended complaint with prejudice, a legal term that means the same claims cannot be filed again in that court, although the president may still appeal to a higher court. The ruling, reported by Reuters, CNN, The Wall Street Journal itself, and the Associated Press, came just three days before the November 3 midterm elections, at a moment when the president’s relationship with the press, and his use of lawsuits against news organisations, has itself become part of the national campaign debate.
The case centred on a Journal report published in July 2025 that described a letter bearing Trump’s name in a leather-bound album assembled for Jeffrey Epstein’s fiftieth birthday in 2003. The newspaper reported that the album was compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell, who was later convicted in connection with Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation, and that the letter in question included sexually suggestive text framed by a drawing. Trump has consistently denied writing the letter, has called the story false, and has said the newspaper published it knowing it was untrue. The Journal has stood by its reporting. The dismissal does not decide, as a matter of historical fact, who wrote the letter. It decides a narrower, but in American law decisive, question: whether Trump’s complaint plausibly alleged that the defendants published the story with actual malice, meaning that they knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true.
Judge Gayles found that it did not. In language quoted across the coverage of the ruling, he wrote that Trump’s allegations were conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article itself, and often irrelevant to the question of actual malice. He added, in a sentence that quickly became the most quoted line of the order, that as with his first attempt, the president had failed. The judge also described the lawsuit’s approach to the Journal’s investigation as grasping at straws and attempting to manufacture flaws in the reporting, a criticism that goes beyond a dry procedural finding and signals the court’s view that the amended complaint had not cured the weaknesses identified in the first dismissal. Dow Jones told CNN it was pleased with the decision. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday, according to CNN, while a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said the president would appeal.
Why The Trump Wall Street Journal Lawsuit Dismissal Turns On Actual Malice
To understand why this case failed twice, it helps to understand the unusually high bar that American defamation law sets for public figures. Under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 decision in New York Times Company v. Sullivan, a public official or other public figure who sues for defamation must prove not merely that a statement was false or damaging, but that the publisher acted with actual malice. That means the plaintiff must show, with specific facts rather than general accusations, that the publisher either knew the statement was false when it published it or recklessly disregarded obvious signs that it might be false. A publisher that investigates, seeks comment, and publishes a story it believes to be true is protected even if later evidence casts doubt on a detail, because the First Amendment is designed to leave breathing room for reporting on powerful people.
Judge Gayles applied that standard in both rounds of the case. In April 2026, he dismissed Trump’s original complaint, finding that its claims of malice were formulaic and came nowhere close to the required standard, but he gave Trump a chance to amend the complaint and try again. That is a routine step in federal court: a first dismissal without prejudice allows a plaintiff to fix a defective pleading if the facts allow it. Trump filed an amended complaint in May 2026, and the Journal moved to dismiss it in June. Saturday’s ruling was the answer to that second attempt, and its with-prejudice character is the court’s judgment that a third attempt would be futile on the facts as alleged. In his order, the judge wrote that because this was the president’s second attempt to allege his claims, dismissal with prejudice was appropriate, and he noted that the amended complaint still had not plausibly alleged that each defendant made defamatory statements with actual malice.
One argument the judge rejected in particular illustrates how the First Amendment standard works in practice. Trump had argued, in substance, that the Journal should have held the story after he denied writing the letter. Judge Gayles rejected that reasoning, writing that if a denial alone blocked publication, any time a public figure or his team denied an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory reporting. That point matters beyond this case, because it protects the basic newsgathering practice of seeking comment from the subject of a story and then publishing both the reporting and the denial. The Journal’s account of its reporting, as described in the coverage of the ruling, emphasised that its reporters had conducted what the judge called a thoughtful and detailed investigation and had sought comment from Trump and other officials before publication. A plaintiff who wants to overcome that record must allege something more specific than disagreement with the conclusion: for example, a source who told the reporters the document was fake, a document the reporters ignored, or an internal message showing doubt that was suppressed.
The amended complaint, in the judge’s assessment, did not do that. Instead, it pointed to alleged inconsistencies and gaps in the investigation and asked the court to infer malice from them. Courts routinely reject that kind of inference in defamation cases, because an imperfect investigation is not the same as a dishonest one, and because allowing a lawsuit to proceed on that basis alone would chill reporting on public figures. Reporters would have to prove, before publication, that every step of their work was flawless, a standard no newsroom could meet on a deadline. That is why the judge’s description of the complaint as grasping at straws is legally significant, not merely colourful: it says the complaint was reaching for an inference the law does not permit.
The Letter At The Centre Of The Case
The underlying reporting concerned one of the most sensitive subjects in American public life. Epstein, a wealthy financier, died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, and Maxwell was later convicted of helping him recruit and groom girls for abuse. The question of who knew Epstein, and how well, has therefore carried enormous political weight, and Trump, who knew Epstein socially in earlier decades before, by his own account, falling out with him, has repeatedly denied any involvement in Epstein’s crimes. No court has found that Trump committed such crimes, and the Journal’s 2025 story did not accuse him of doing so. It reported on a birthday album and a letter said to bear his name, a narrower claim that Trump nevertheless treated as defamatory because of the letter’s sexually suggestive character and its association with Epstein.
The Journal first reported the existence of the letter in July 2025, and in September 2025 it published the alleged note in full, including what it described as Trump’s signature. The published version, as described in later coverage, included the lines that the two men had certain things in common and a birthday wish that every day be another wonderful secret, set within a crude drawing. Trump sued the day the story reached print, seeking at least 10 billion dollars in damages and accusing the defendants of knowingly and recklessly publishing false and disparaging statements that caused overwhelming financial and reputational harm. The size of the damages claim, among the largest ever sought in a defamation case against a newspaper, ensured the case would be watched far beyond the courtroom in Miami, and it also shaped the public debate: supporters of the president presented the lawsuit as a stand against a hostile press, while press-freedom advocates presented it as an attempt to use the courts to punish reporting the president disliked.
That debate is the reason the case matters even though it is, in strict legal terms, a dispute about one letter. Presidents have sued newspapers before, but rarely while in office, and rarely for sums of this size. The dismissal therefore does not merely resolve a private dispute. It reaffirms, in a case brought by a sitting president, that the Sullivan standard applies with full force to the most powerful public figure in the country, and that a court will not lower that standard because the plaintiff occupies the White House. At the same time, the ruling does not vindicate the Journal’s reporting in the sense of proving the letter authentic. A dismissal for failure to allege actual malice says the complaint did not meet the legal test for proceeding, not that every detail of the story has been proved true. Both sides are therefore likely to keep arguing about the underlying facts, even as the legal case in Miami comes to an end unless an appeal revives it.
Trump’s Second Attempt, And What The First Dismissal Had Warned
The history of the case shows a court giving the president every procedural opportunity the rules allow, and then concluding that the opportunity had not been used successfully. When Judge Gayles dismissed the original complaint in April, he did not merely reject it; he explained, at length, what was missing, and he gave Trump until late April to file a revised version. The amended complaint arrived in May, and the parties briefed the Journal’s motion to dismiss through the summer, with a hearing in August at which Trump’s lawyer argued that the reporters had failed to do the investigation necessary to determine whether Trump had signed the letter. That argument, in the judge’s final view, still confused a dispute about the quality of an investigation with proof of a knowing falsehood, and it did not identify the kind of specific, contemporaneous evidence of doubt or fabrication that Sullivan requires.
The 20-page order on Saturday therefore reads, in the accounts published so far, as a closing of a loop rather than a surprise. The judge had warned in April that the original complaint came nowhere close to the standard, and the amended complaint, by his assessment, moved no closer. That pattern also explains why the dismissal was with prejudice rather than a third invitation to amend. Federal judges have discretion to allow repeated amendments when a plaintiff shows that new facts could cure a defect, but they are not required to allow endless attempts, and a second failure on the same central issue is a recognised ground for ending the case in the trial court. The practical consequence is that Trump cannot simply refile the same defamation claims against the same defendants in the Southern District of Florida. He can appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which would review whether the judge applied the law correctly, and he can pursue other legal claims or other lawsuits, but the Miami case as filed is over.
The question of legal fees remains open and could become the next chapter. Reports of the ruling noted that the judge had not yet decided whether the defendants could recover their legal costs, and that documents relating to attorneys’ fees were due within 30 days of Saturday’s order. In American defamation litigation, fee awards are not automatic, and the parties would have to brief whether any statute or rule entitles the prevailing defendants to recover costs. If the Journal and its co-defendants seek fees, that dispute could keep the case in the news even after the merits have been decided, and it could also affect how other news organisations assess the risk of being sued by a sitting president. A fee award would send a signal that a failed high-profile defamation suit carries a financial cost for the plaintiff as well as for the defendant, while a denial would leave the existing rule, under which each side ordinarily bears its own costs, intact.
The Other Side: What Trump And Dow Jones Have Said
Both sides have framed the case in terms that go beyond the courtroom, and a fair account must present both framings without adopting either as fact. Trump has said the letter is fake, that he did not write it, and that the Journal published a false story to damage him. His legal team, after Saturday’s ruling, said he would appeal, a statement that signals the president does not accept the judge’s assessment and intends to ask a higher court to reconsider it. That is his right, and appeals in defamation cases sometimes succeed where trial-court dismissals have failed, particularly when an appellate court reads the complaint’s allegations more generously than the trial judge did. An appeal would take months, would be decided on the written record rather than on new evidence, and would not, by itself, restore the case to trial unless the Eleventh Circuit reversed the dismissal.
Dow Jones, for its part, has said it is pleased with the court’s decision, a brief statement that reflects a publisher’s interest in a ruling that protects its reporting process rather than in relitigating the letter itself. The Journal’s own account of the ruling emphasised the judge’s finding that the allegations were conclusory and inconsistent with the article, and it noted that the judge had been appointed by President Barack Obama, a detail that some commentators have seized on and others have dismissed as irrelevant to a ruling grounded in a Supreme Court precedent that has bound judges of both parties for more than six decades. The more durable point is institutional: a federal judge, applying a standard created by the Supreme Court in 1964, found that even a lawsuit brought by a sitting president must meet the same test as any other public-figure defamation claim, and that a complaint built on disagreement with a newsroom’s conclusions does not meet it.
The broader context also includes other lawsuits involving the president and the press. Trump has pursued or threatened legal action against several major news organisations during his second term, and several of those organisations, including CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, have separately sued the administration over access to the White House after being excluded from the press pool in September. Those cases raise different legal questions, about access rather than defamation, but together they form a pattern that press-freedom groups describe as pressure on independent journalism and that the administration’s supporters describe as accountability for biased coverage. Saturday’s ruling does not decide those access cases, and it does not settle the political argument about media bias, but it does set a legal marker: in a defamation case, at least, the courts have so far required specific proof of knowing falsehood, not merely a claim that coverage was unfair.
What This Means For The Midterms And For Press Freedom
The timing of the ruling, three days before voters decide control of Congress, gives it a political resonance that a court decision in an ordinary week would not have. Trump has made his confrontations with the press a central theme of his closing midterm campaign, telling supporters at rallies that the media has treated Republicans unfairly and urging them to vote as if he himself were on the ballot. A dismissal of his own lawsuit, on the weekend before the election, complicates that message, because it shows a federal court rejecting the legal theory behind one of his most prominent media cases. Democrats, for their part, are likely to cite the ruling as evidence that the president’s claims about the press do not survive judicial scrutiny, while Republicans may argue that the ruling shows only that the legal system protects established media outlets, not that the reporting was fair. Neither political spin changes the legal holding, but both show why the case will be cited on the campaign trail even after the court has spoken.
For newsrooms, the ruling is a reminder of both the protection and the limits of Sullivan. The protection is real: a public figure cannot force a newspaper into a costly trial merely by alleging that a story was false and damaging. The limit is equally real: the protection depends on a newsroom being able to show, if challenged, that it investigated in good faith, sought comment, and did not ignore clear evidence of falsity. News organisations that cut corners, suppress doubts, or publish without checking may still face liability, and the judge’s praise for what he called a thoughtful and detailed investigation suggests that the Journal’s process mattered to the outcome. In that sense, the case is less a blanket victory for the press than a victory for a particular kind of press practice, one that documents its work and gives its subjects a chance to respond.
For voters, the case is also a test of how to read a court ruling in a polarised environment. A dismissal with prejudice sounds final, and in the trial court it is, but it is not the last word if an appeal follows, and it is not a finding about the truth of the underlying letter. Readers who want to understand the ruling should hold those two ideas together: the court found the complaint legally insufficient, and the factual dispute about the letter remains contested in public even though it will no longer be litigated in Miami unless an appellate court orders otherwise. That distinction, between legal sufficiency and historical truth, is often lost in political debate, but it is the distinction on which the entire American law of defamation rests, and it is why the Sullivan standard has survived for more than sixty years despite repeated challenges from public figures of both parties.
What Happens Next
The immediate next steps are procedural and will unfold over weeks rather than days. Trump’s legal team has said it will appeal, which means a notice of appeal and briefing in the Eleventh Circuit, where a three-judge panel would decide whether Judge Gayles correctly applied the actual malice standard to the amended complaint. The Journal and its co-defendants, meanwhile, have a window to seek attorneys’ fees, with filings due within 30 days, and the court will have to decide whether any fee award is warranted. Neither step will change the fact that, as of Saturday, the lawsuit cannot proceed in the trial court, and neither step will produce a trial on the letter itself unless the appeal succeeds.
Beyond the courtroom, the ruling is likely to be cited in the ongoing debate about presidential lawsuits against the media, in law school discussions of Sullivan, and in newsroom training about the importance of documenting an investigation. It may also affect the calculations of other public figures considering defamation suits against newspapers, because it shows that even a claim for 10 billion dollars, brought by a sitting president, will be dismissed if it cannot allege specific facts showing knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. Whether that effect is to deter meritless suits or to discourage legitimate ones is itself a matter of debate, and it will be argued, as Sullivan itself has been argued, by people who disagree about the proper balance between reputation and free speech.
For now, the clearest statement of the law comes from the judge’s own order: a second attempt has failed, the complaint did not plausibly allege actual malice, and the case is dismissed with prejudice. The president may appeal, the defendants may seek fees, and the public argument about the letter and about the press will continue. But in the courtroom where the case was filed, the Trump Wall Street Journal lawsuit has reached its end, three days before an election in which the president has asked voters to judge, among other things, his fight with the media. Readers following the legal battles around the White House can also follow our earlier coverage of the related press-access disputes, which explain how the administration’s confrontations with news organisations have played out in court as well as on the campaign trail.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Reuters, CNN and The Wall Street Journal.