President Donald Trump this week refiled a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, which also names its owner and two reporters as defendants, for its reporting on a birthday letter allegedly signed and sent to deceased sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. Photo by Al Drago/UPI | License Photo
President Donald Trump this week refiled a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal related to its reporting on a birthday letter that he allegedly sent to deceased sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump refiled the $10 billion lawsuit on Wednesday, which he initially filed in July 2025 after the Wall Street Journal published an article about a birthday book collected for Epstein that included a letter and drawing he allegedly contributed, The New York Times reported.
A federal judge in Florida dismissed the suit in April, which was filed against both the newspaper and its owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, because Trump’s attorneys failed to show that “actual malice” had been committed against him.
Although Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that the Journal had not published the article with malice — a higher bar to prove because Trump is a public figure — he ruled that Trump would be able to refile the lawsuit after April 27.
The new suit, which is aimed at Murdoch and two reporters who worked on the story, alleged that the Journal’s reporting had “glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting,” Politico reported.
The drawing, part of the book compiled for Epstein by his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003, included a message written within the outlines of a naked woman and appears to have been signed by Trump.
The Journal reported it had seen the letter in the book, but Trump contended that he “never wrote a picture in my life.”
“I don’t draw pictures of women,” Trump said, adding that the message was “not my language. It’s not my words.”
In materials that were later turned over to the House Oversight Committee, which included the entire book, the message was revealed to include the sentence “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump’s name appears numerous times in the series of Epstein file releases from the Department of Justice over the last year.
While the president has not been charged with any wrongdoing, he did have a decades-long friendship with Epstein before reportedly falling out with him over a real estate deal in West Palm Beach.
This week in Washington
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump participate in a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Wednesday. Photo by Samuel Corum/UPI | License Photo
