Miami judge permanently dismisses Trump's $10 billion suit against the WSJ

A federal judge in Miami on Saturday threw out a defamation suit in which Donald Trump sought $10 billion from The Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over a Journal story about the president's links to Jeffrey Epstein. The Times of Israel, carrying a report from the Associated Press (AP), said US District Judge Darrin Gayles found that Trump had not shown the defendants published defamatory statements with actual malice, the legal threshold the case had to meet. The judge wrote that the president was "grasping at straws".

The dismissal was issued with prejudice, meaning the case is closed for good and Trump cannot bring the same claim again. According to the AP account, the ruling also said the suit had tried to "manufacture" flaws in the newspaper's investigative reporting. In Israel, Ynet flagged the ruling in a news alert, describing the case as Trump's suit against the Journal over its publication of a greeting addressed to Epstein.

What the case was about

The lawsuit targeted both the newspaper and Murdoch, whom the AP report describes as a media mogul. Its subject was a Journal article reporting on ties between Trump and Epstein, the financier. The two Israeli outlets describe the disputed item slightly differently: the Times of Israel headline refers to an "Epstein letter", while Ynet's Hebrew alert uses a word that translates as a greeting or a blessing. Neither report, as provided, quotes the text of that item or sets out what Trump said in it was false.

The Times of Israel illustrated its story with a photograph showing Epstein alongside Trump at an unidentified location. The US Justice Department made the image public on January 30, 2026, among the documents and photographs known as the Epstein files. The photograph is undated, and the caption does not link it to the newspaper story at the centre of the lawsuit.

What "actual malice" means

In American defamation law, a public figure who sues over a published statement must clear a higher bar than a private citizen. It is not enough to show that a statement was wrong or damaging. The plaintiff has to show actual malice, which in this legal sense means the publisher knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true. A sitting president is about as public a figure as exists, which is why the standard applied here. According to the AP report, Judge Gayles concluded that Trump had not met it.

Why "with prejudice" matters

Courts can dismiss a case in two broad ways. A dismissal without prejudice leaves the door open for a plaintiff to fix problems in a complaint and file again. A dismissal with prejudice ends the matter on that claim. The AP report stresses this point, describing the outcome as permanent. Any further legal route would have to run through an appeal of the ruling itself; the reports do not say whether one is planned.

Trump and the press

The AP account frames the decision as a setback for Trump and his administration, noting that both have taken an adversarial stance toward news organisations during his second term in office. The Journal was not the only outlet the president has been in conflict with, the report indicates, though the excerpt available to us breaks off before naming the others.

In Israel, both Ynet, a major Hebrew news site, and the English-language Times of Israel reported the ruling within hours of each other.

What the reports do not say

Several questions remain open in the material available. The reports do not say how Trump, his lawyers or the White House responded to the ruling, or whether an appeal will be filed. They do not include any reaction from The Wall Street Journal or from Murdoch. They do not give the date the lawsuit was originally filed, the date the Journal story appeared, or the content of the letter or greeting at issue. Nor do they explain how the judge assessed specific passages of the article. Readers should treat the description of the ruling as resting on the AP report published by the Times of Israel, with Ynet's alert confirming that the suit was rejected.