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A federal judge in Miami has permanently dismissed President Donald Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, ending — for now — one of the highest-profile press lawsuits of his presidency. US District Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the case with prejudice on Saturday, October 31, meaning the same claims cannot simply be refiled.
What the judge actually decided
The ruling turned on "actual malice," the legal standard that public figures must meet in American defamation cases. According to reports from Firstpost and The Hindu BusinessLine, Judge Gayles found that Trump's amended complaint still failed to plausibly allege that the defendants made defamatory statements with actual malice — that is, knowing they were false or recklessly disregarding whether they were true. The judge was reported to have described the effort as "grasping at straws" in its attempt to manufacture flaws in the Journal's reporting.
That distinction matters. The dismissal is not a court finding that the underlying reporting was true, nor a finding that it was false. It is a finding that the complaint, even in its second version, did not clear the pleading bar for a public-figure defamation claim. Because this was Trump's second attempt — Gayles had dismissed an earlier version in April and allowed an amended filing in May — the judge ruled that dismissal with prejudice was appropriate.
The story at the centre of the case
The lawsuit concerned a Journal article published on July 17, 2025, which described a sexually suggestive letter and drawing that the paper said bore Trump's name and appeared in a 2003 album compiled for financier Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday. The album was reportedly collected by Ghislaine Maxwell. Trump has denied the letter was real, insisting it was fabricated, and said he personally contacted Murdoch before publication in an effort to stop the story.
The complaint, filed in federal court in Miami, accused the paper and its journalists of "knowingly and recklessly" publishing "numerous false, defamatory and disparaging statements" that caused "overwhelming financial and reputational harm." The defendants denied the claims. With the case dismissed with prejudice, Trump cannot amend the same complaint again — though the ruling does not prevent him from appealing the dismissal itself.
Why "with prejudice" is the key phrase
In ordinary language, a case being "thrown out" can sound temporary. In court language, "with prejudice" is the opposite: it closes the door on those claims in that court. A dismissal "without prejudice" would have let Trump try again with a new filing; this one does not. That is why Saturday's ruling is being reported as the end of this particular legal challenge, even though the political argument about the Epstein reporting will plainly continue.
The case also sits inside a wider pattern. Trump has pursued several large defamation and media claims in recent years, and courts have repeatedly tested them against the actual-malice standard set by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan more than six decades ago. That standard was designed to give the press breathing room to report on public figures — and it is deliberately hard to meet. Saturday's ruling is a reminder of just how hard: a sitting president, suing for $10 billion, still lost twice on the same pleading point.
What happens next is procedural rather than dramatic. An appeal is the remaining route if Trump chooses it, and any appeal would test the same question — whether the amended complaint plausibly alleged actual malice — rather than relitigating the letter itself. For readers, the practical takeaway is narrower than the headlines: the court has not settled what was in Epstein's birthday album. It has settled that this lawsuit, as pleaded, does not survive.