A federal judge from Florida, Darrin Gayles, has once again rejected the $10 billion defamation lawsuit filed against the newspaper 'The Wall Street Journal' for reporting that the now president sent an "obscene" birthday greeting to the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on the occasion of his 50th birthday.
Magistrate Gayles concludes that this new legal action falls into the same problem as the first complaint brought by Trump’s legal team, by not meeting the basic requirements to prove that the information was disseminated with "actual malice".
"Because President Trump has not plausibly argued that each defendant made defamatory statements with actual malice, the Amended Complaint must be dismissed and as this is President Trump’s second attempt to bring this case, the Court finds that dismissal is appropriate," the ruling states.
Trump had initially sued the newspaper in July, shortly after an article was published about a birthday book that Ghislaine Maxwell prepared for Epstein in 2003 and in which there was a card attributed to Trump.
Although the American paper did not publish the image of that card, the Democrats on the oversight committee of the United States House of Representatives made it public on their social media in September 2025.
The president was claiming $10 billion (more than 8.5 billion euros) in damages for the newspaper's reference to the image of the alleged card sent to Epstein, in which there appeared the sketch of a naked woman and, beneath it, the magnate's signature simulating pubic hair. Trump and the White House maintain that the card is false.