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A federal judge has dismissed President Donald Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and its owner Rupert Murdoch stemming from its coverage of his ties to late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the Associated Press reports.
U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles in Florida ruled that Trump failed to make the argument that the article published by the Wall Street Journal on a sexually suggestive letter to Epstein that included Trump's signature was not done so with malicious intent. Gayles did, however, give the president the chance to file an amended complaint.
The note, which was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal in July and Trump publicly denied existed, includes a drawing of a woman's body and was allegedly written in a book compiled by longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. The book was turned over to the House Oversight Committee along with a larger tranche of documents, Rep. Robert Garcia, the panel's top Democrat, confirmed in a statement obtained by Axios in July.
Trump threatened to sue the Wall Street Journal for its report, which he called "defamatory" and "a fake thing" in a post shared on his Truth Social account at the time.
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” Trump told the newspaper in a phone interview in July via NBC News. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
Attorneys for Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal asked Gayles to rule that the article's statements were true and , therefore, couldn't be considered defamatory, but the judge, instead, wrote that “whether President Trump was the author of the Letter or Epstein’s friend are questions of fact that cannot be determined at this stage of the litigation," according to the Associated Press.