U.S. President Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson | Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
A federal judge in Florida on Monday dismissed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against media baron Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal, which claimed the newspaper defamed Trump with a story saying the president had sent a “bawdy” 50th birthday letter to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But Trump will be given the chance to file a new amended lawsuit in the case, Judge Darrin Gayles said in his ruling in U.S. District Court in Miami.
Gayles said he had to dismiss the civil complaint because Trump, who has denied sending the letter to his then-friend Epstein in 2003, had “not plausibly alleged that the Defendants published the Article with actual malice.”
Plaintiffs who are public figures like Trump must show that a defendant had actual malice when they made allegedly defamatory statements, according to legal precedent.
But Gayles, in his decision allowing Trump to amend his lawsuit, cited another precedent that says a plaintiff “should have the opportunity to amend his complaint” if a lawsuit was tossed out for failing to plead facts in that suit “giving rise to an inference of actual malice.”
CNBC has requested comment from the Wall Street Journal, which owned by Murdoch’s company, News Corp. The White House referred questions about the dismissal to Trump’s lawyer; CNBC has requested comment from a spokesman for Trump’s legal team.
The Wall Street Journal on July 17 published an article that said a letter bearing Trump’s signature was included in an album of letters that Epstein was giving for his 50th birthday. The article said Trump sent the letter at the request of Epstein’s close friend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who two decades later was convicted of procuring underage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.
The Journal noted that the 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,” Journal reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo said in the article.
“The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,'” they wrote.
Trump angrily denied writing the letter, saying, “This is not me. This is a fake thing.”
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” the president said at the time.
A day after the Journal published the article, Trump filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, the two reporters, Murdoch, News Corp., company’s CEO Robert Thompson, and the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones and Co.
On Sept. 8, Democrats in the House of Representatives released an image of what appeared to be a letter to Epstein signed by Trump, which matched the description of the letter detailed in the Journal’s article. The letter was obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committe after that panel issued a subpoena to Epstein’s estate.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, at the time of the release, said it proved that Trump did not draw the picture or sign it.
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