The Wall Street Journal filed a motion Monday asking a federal court to throw out President Donald Trump‘s defamation lawsuit — which seeks at least $20 billion in damages — over an article in the Journal about a birthday letter purportedly written by Trump to Jeffrey Epstein. The first reason it should be thrown out, according to the WSJ’s filing: “The article is true.”
On July 17, 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that a letter bearing Trump’s name appeared in a birthday book containing letters from the family and friends of Epstein, the disgraced financier who was a convicted sex offender. In an interview with the paper, the president denied writing the letter. “This is not me,” Trump said, as quoted by the Journal. “This is a fake thing.”
According to the Wall Street Journal‘s story, written by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo, the letter was part of a birthday album compiled by Epstein’s associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, filled with messages from several prominent people, including attorney Alan Dershowitz and former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner. The paper reported that Trump’s letter “…contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair. The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.’” Epstein died in his jail cell in 2019, with a medical examiner ruling the cause was suicide by hanging.
One day after the story was published, Trump sued Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida alleging the publication and its journalists defamed him. According to the lawsuit, Trump seeks “not less than $10 billion” on two counts of defamation, for at least $20 billion total.
“While this case’s threat to the First Amendment is serious, the claims asserted by President Trump are meritless and should be promptly dismissed with prejudice,” the Wall Street Journal said in the motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The motion also asks the court to order Trump to pay the defendants’ attorneys’ fees and costs.
The Journal said the first reason Trump’s suit should be thrown out is because the WSJ article in question “is true.” Two weeks ago, in response to a congressional subpoena, “Epstein’s estate produced the Birthday Book, which contains the letter bearing the bawdy drawing and [Trump’s] signature, exactly as The Wall Street Journal reported.”
Second, the article is not defamatory, according to the Journal’s filing. “Even if it had reported that President Trump personally crafted the letter—and it does not—there is nothing defamatory about a person sending a bawdy note to a friend, and the Article cannot damage Plaintiff’s reputation as a matter of law,” it said. “Plaintiff acknowledged his friendship with Epstein. As the Article reports, three months before the Birthday Book was gifted to Epstein, a New York magazine article quoted Plaintiff as saying that he had known Epstein for ’15 years’ and that Epstein was a ‘terrific guy,’ ‘a lot of fun to be with,’ and ‘likes beautiful women as much as I do.’ President Trump has also publicly admitted to “locker room” talk and has made numerous bawdy public statements. The Article is therefore consistent with President Trump’s self-described reputation.”
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Finally, Trump “has not pled, and cannot plead” that the Wall Street Journal published the article with “actual malice,” a legal standard for proving libel. “The Complaint clumps together all six Defendants and does not include a single plausible allegation that any of them, much less all of them, caused The Wall Street Journal to publish knowingly false statements,” the filing said.
“In an affront to the First Amendment, the President of the United States brought this lawsuit to silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public,” the filing said. “By its very nature, this meritless lawsuit threatens to chill the speech of those who dare to publish content that the President does not like. This lawsuit should not be permitted to proceed because ‘[f]orcing publishers to defend inappropriate suits through expensive discovery proceedings . . . would constrict’ the ‘breathing space’ that the First Amendment demands.”
A copy of the WSJ/Dow Jones/News Corp filing is available at this link.
The move to dismiss the suit comes after a federal judge tossed Trump’s $15 billion defamation suit against the New York Times, calling it “tedious and burdensome” and saying that a complaint is not “a protected platform to rage against an adversary.” The judge in that case gave Trump’s lawyers 28 days to refile an amended complaint that “[accords] with the rules of procedure.”
From Variety US