Federal Judge Throws Out Trump's Epstein Birthday Letter Lawsuit - But the Fight Isn't Over Yet
President Donald Trump will have another chance to file his defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and others.
So said U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles, who ruled Monday that the president, in suing the WSJ for publishing the contents of what it called a “bawdy” 2003 birthday letter allegedly from Trump to the now-deceased sex offender and suspected sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, failed to prove malice on the defendants’ part.
“Here, the Complaint falls short of pleading actual malice,” Gayles wrote.
Moreover, the judge added that in at least one respect Trump’s case fell short of the legal standard.
“The Complaint also alleges that President Trump told Defendants that the Letter was a fake before they ran the Article,” Gayles wrote. “President Trump argues that this allegation shows that Defendants acted with serious doubts about the truth of their reporting and, therefore, with actual malice. The Court disagrees.”
The judge then indicated that in order to establish malice “a plaintiff must show the defendant deliberately avoided investigating the veracity of the statement in order to evade learning the truth.”
“The Complaint comes nowhere close to this standard,” Gayles wrote.
On July 17, 2025, the WSJ claimed that in 2003 Trump sent Epstein a “bawdy” birthday note. Inside an apparently hand-drawn outline of a naked woman, the now-president allegedly crafted a cryptic, imagined dialogue between himself and Epstein, complete with a signature “mimicking public hair” in the naked woman’s private area.
Of course, the text of the alleged Trump letter sounded strange to many who know the president’s familiar style. In fact, an analysis via Grok AI placed the likelihood of Trump’s authorship at only 15 percent.
Likewise, former FBI analyst Wayne Barnes, commissioned to examine the birthday letter by the conservative news site Just the News, detected problems with paper coloration, which meant, he said, that the Epstein birthday letter likely included a “fraudulent signature.”
Gayles, appointed to the federal judiciary by President Barack Obama in 2014 and confirmed 98-0 by the Senate, acknowledged questions about both the birthday letter’s authenticity and the defendants’ claims to First Amendment protections.
“However,” he wrote, “most of those questions are for another day.”
In fact, Gayles took multiple actions consistent with a judge who intended to postpone resolving questions of material fact.
“Because the Complaint is dismissed without prejudice and with leave to amend,” the judge wrote, “the Court denies Defendants’ request for fees and costs without prejudice and with leave to renew.”
In other words, since the case’s merits remain unresolved, Gayles did not rule that Trump brought a frivolous lawsuit, which would have required the president to pay the defendants’ attorneys’ fees and costs.
Likewise, the judge gave Trump an Apr. 27 deadline to file an amended complaint.
“President Trump will follow Judge Gayles’s ruling and guidance to refile this powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other Defendants,” a Trump spokesperson said in a statement, per CNBC.
“The President will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People,” the statement added.
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