Judge Dismisses Trump’s $10 Billion Wall Street Journal Suit

A federal judge dismissed President Donald Trump’s revised $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and the newspaper’s journalists over a sexually suggestive 2003 birthday letter allegedly bearing Trump’s name and included in an album for Jeffrey Epstein. Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that Trump had not plausibly shown the defendants acted with actual malice, the standard for a public figure’s defamation claim, and said the amended complaint tried to manufacture flaws in the Journal’s reporting. The dismissal was with prejudice, permanently barring Trump from refiling; Trump has denied writing the letter and called the report false. Separately, in Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC over its editing of a documentary about the January 6 Capitol attack, a judge ordered him to provide requested documents by November 23, a log of documents withheld under privilege claims by November 5, and sit for a deposition by December 11. The judge warned that failure to comply could lead to sanctions or dismissal, citing concerns about the adequacy of Trump’s document search.