Rupert Murdoch looks on, at the White House, in Washington, U.S. Feb. 3, 2025.
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters
Why let a $10 billion lawsuit get in the way of old friends having some chicken and gravy for dinner?
President Donald Trump last week dined at the White House with Rupert Murdoch and that media baron’s key lieutenants, despite Trump’s ongoing defamation lawsuit over Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal reporting that he sent a “bawdy” 50th birthday letter to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to a new report.
Breaker Media on Tuesday night reported that Trump hosted his fellow billionaire Murdoch and company at the White House last Thursday.
Guests included Murdoch’s wife, Elena Zhukova, New York Post editor Keith Poole and Post columnists Miranda Devine and Douglas Murray, News UK CEO Rebekah Brooks, The Sun editor-at-large Harry Cole, as well as Vice President JD Vance and White House Susie Wiles, Breaker reported. Murdoch’s News Corp owns The Post, The Sun, and News UK, along with the Journal.
The outlet said the group ate chicken and gravy.
Three months before the dinner, Trump, in a social media post, wrote, “I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his ‘pile of garbage’ newspaper, the WSJ.”
“That will be an interesting experience!!!” the president wrote.
CNBC has requested comment on the report from News Corp and the White House. A spokesman for Trump’s legal team declined to comment.
The reported dinner came five days before Trump’s legal team filed a blistering response to a request by Murdoch’s lawyers that a federal judge in Miami dismiss the president’s defamation lawsuit.
That suit is a glaring exception to the often cozy relationship Trump has with Murdoch’s conservative media empire, which includes Fox News. The Post and Fox have acted as cheerleaders for Trump and his policies for years, and Trump, for decades, has been an avid reader of and fixture in The Post’s tabloid pages.
The current dispute stems from a July 17 report by the Journal, which said that a risqué letter bearing Trump’s signature was included in an album of letters that Epstein was given for his 50th birthday party in 2003.
At the time of the party, Trump was a friend of Epstein. The two later had a falling out; Epstein died from a jailhouse suicide in August 2019, weeks after being arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges.
The Journal noted that the typewritten text of the letter was “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,” the newspaper noted.
Trump angrily denied writing the letter the night that the Journal story was published.
“This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
Trump also said that he had personally warned Murdoch that Trump would sue him if the Journal printed the story.
“Mr. Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but, obviously, did not have the power to do so,” Trump claimed on Truth Social.
On July 18, Trump sued Murdoch, the Journal, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, and the two reporters who wrote the article.
The lawsuit denied that Trump authored the letter, and that, “Despite the glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting, Defendants Dow Jones and News Corp — at the direction of Defendants Murdoch and Thomson — published to the world the false, defamatory, and malignant statements authored by Defendants.”
Trump has continued denying he wrote the letter even after Democrats in the House of Representatives in early September released a screenshot of the missive that the Journal reported on. The letter was obtained by the House Oversight Committee from Epstein’s estate, pursuant to a subpoena.
Murdoch’s lawyers flagged that letter to the judge overseeing Trump’s lawsuit.
In their motion to dismiss that case, Murdoch’s lawyers said that the article is true, and that the letter released by the House panel contains a “letter identical to the one described in the Article.”
The lawyers also argued that the article is not defamatory.
The motion noted that Trump has acknowledged being a longtime friend of Epstein, and that he was quoted by New York magazine three months before the birthday party, calling Epstein a “terrific guy”
who “likes beautiful women as much as I do.”
“President Trump has also publicly admitted to ‘locker room’ talk and has made numerous bawdy public statements,” Murdoch’s lawyers wrote.
“The Article is therefore consistent with President Trump’s self-described reputation.”
Trump’s lawyers, in their response to that motion, called the arguments by Murdoch’s lawyers “disjointed” and incorrect.
“The Article was fully driven by Defendants’ salacious and scandal-driven narratives that prioritize gossip, clicks, and profit over truth,” Trump’s lawyers said.
