President Donald Trump Sues The Wall Street Journal: First Amendment Analysis

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President Donald Trump Sues The Wall Street Journal: First Amendment Analysis
https://www.freedomforum.org/trump-wall-street-journal-first-amendment-defamation/




By Kevin Goldberg Jul. 18, 2025

President Donald Trump is suing The Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch and publisher Dow Jones & Co., as well as two reporters, after the paper published an article stating that Trump sent a letter to financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 that included a lewd drawing and birthday wishes containing sexual innuendo. Three years later, in 2006, Epstein was convicted of prostitution-related criminal charges, many of which involved underaged girls, and faced several additional charges in the following years. He died in prison in 2019.

In a post to his Truth Social account, Trump described The Wall Street Journal article as “false, malicious, and defamatory” because “the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE” — something Trump said he also told Murdoch and Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker when contacted by the paper prior to publication.Now that he has filed a lawsuit, Trump will likely have a chance to probe at The Wall Street Journal’s newsgathering — including internal conversations — to see how it verified its information. The actual malice standard would require Trump to show that the paper’s reporters and editors believed the letter to be fake or that they recklessly disregarded the possibility that the letter doesn’t exist or is false.

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But The Wall Street Journal reporters claim that they have seen the letter among other documents in an album compiled by Epstein’s friend Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently in federal prison for child sex trafficking and other offenses related to Epstein’s activities. Even if the Trump letter and drawing turn out to be false, The Wall Street Journal may claim that it had every reason to believe — and did believe — that the letter and drawing were authentic, particularly if the paper saw it alongside other well wishes to Epstein and with independent verification that it was from Trump. The public existence of other pictures that Trump has drawn not only refutes Trump’s claim denying that he draws pictures at all but also strengthens The Wall Street Journal’s claim that it believes the letter and drawing are real.

This alone is probably enough to protect The Wall Street Journal in a defamation lawsuit, as courts rarely find that actual malice exists absent “smoking gun” type documentation that an article was published despite the existence of serious doubts or actual knowledge about whether it was accurate or not.

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