Trump's WSJ Defamation Suit Dismissed; Appeal Now Pending

A federal judge in Miami has thrown out President Donald Trump's defamation suit against The Wall Street Journal over its July 2025 Epstein birthday letter story, ruling for the second time that the complaint failed to plausibly allege actual malice. Trump has appealed.

Information last verified on November 13, 2026. This is a developing story; we update it as the record changes.

Status: The First Amended Complaint was dismissed WITH PREJUDICE on October 31, 2026 (ECF No. 80). Trump filed a notice of appeal on November 4, 2026 (ECF No. 81), and the Eleventh Circuit docketed the appeal as No. 26-14110-A on November 5, 2026. The appeal is pending and nothing has been decided on appeal. On fees: the district court reserved jurisdiction and gave the defendants 30 days from October 31, 2026 to file an anti-SLAPP fee motion with a choice-of-law discussion. That window had not closed as of November 13, 2026, and in the docket entries we were able to reach on November 13, 2026 the most recent filing was the Eleventh Circuit's docketing notice, entered November 6, 2026. We could not load the full public docket, so we do not assert whether a fee motion has since been filed.

Jurisdiction scope: This is a single federal district court decision from the Southern District of Florida, now on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The actual-malice requirement it applies is federal constitutional law and binds every court in the country, but the specific pleading gloss the court used comes from Eleventh Circuit precedent that is binding only in Alabama, Florida and Georgia. The defamation elements discussed are Florida and New York state law. The anti-SLAPP fee question is a state-law issue whose availability in federal court is itself contested.

What Happened

The dispute starts with an email. On July 15, 2025, Wall Street Journal reporter Joseph Palazzolo emailed then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to say that Dow Jones intended to publish a story about a birthday letter that Trump had purportedly contributed to a 2003 album assembled for Jeffrey Epstein's fiftieth birthday. According to the amended complaint, Leavitt called Palazzolo and said the subject matter was false, Trump's counsel denied that he wrote the letter and warned the publisher not to run the story, and Trump told Rupert Murdoch directly that he had not signed or sent it.

The Journal published anyway. The article ran online two days later and on the front page of the print edition on July 18, 2025, under the headline "Jeffrey Epstein's Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One was from Donald Trump." It described a page bearing Trump's name with typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, reported that the album was compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell, and carried Trump's on-the-record denial that he wrote the letter or drew the picture. It also told readers, in the article's own words, that "[i]t isn't clear how the letter with Trump's signature was prepared."

Trump sued the same day the print edition ran, on July 18, 2025, naming Dow Jones & Company, Inc. d/b/a The Wall Street Journal, News Corporation, Keith Rupert Murdoch, Robert Thomson, and reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo. The complaint pleaded defamation per se and defamation per quod.

The first dismissal

On April 13, 2026, Judge Gayles dismissed that first complaint without prejudice, finding that Trump had not plausibly alleged actual malice and had not alleged special damages for the per quod count. The court denied the defendants' request for attorneys' fees without prejudice and with leave to renew, and set an April 27, 2026 deadline to amend. The court reissued that ruling as an amended order on May 22, 2026, stating on its face that it superseded the original "to correct scrivener's errors."

Trump then asked for limited discovery on actual malice before amending. On May 13, 2026, the court denied that request and extended his amendment deadline to May 27, 2026, reissuing the ruling as an amended order on May 22, 2026 to correct scrivener's errors (ECF Nos. 64, 66). That sequencing matters, because it means the second pleading was written without the discovery Trump said he needed, and the court's eventual with-prejudice ruling came after it had already declined to open that door.

The second dismissal

The First Amended Complaint was filed May 27, 2026. The defendants moved to dismiss with prejudice on June 10, 2026 and asked for fees under Florida or New York anti-SLAPP law. The court heard argument on August 5, 2026 and ruled on October 31, 2026.

The order opens with the Brandeis concurrence in Whitney v. California quoted in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, and gets to the point on its second page: "As with his first attempt, he has failed."

The court first sorted out what it could look at. It incorporated the July 2025 article and a September 8, 2025 follow-up piece into the pleading, because Trump described their contents, they were central to his claims, and he did not dispute their authenticity. It refused to incorporate the Birthday Book and the letter page produced to the House Oversight Committee, because Trump disputes their authenticity and the court said it "cannot make a factual finding, at this time," that the produced documents are the ones the Journal reviewed.

Then it declined to decide the two questions most readers would assume a defamation case is about. The defendants asked the court to find the article true and to find the statements non-defamatory as a matter of law. The court refused both, saying that because the malice allegations failed, it did not need to reach them, and that "whether President Trump was the author of the Letter or Epstein's friend are questions of fact that cannot be determined on a motion to dismiss."

The actual-malice analysis then worked through four theories and rejected each one.

Conclusory labels. Allegations that the defendants "knew or should have known" the statements were false are not facts and earn no presumption of truth.

The denial. The court read the amended complaint as arguing that publishing over Trump's denial was itself malice, and rejected the premise in the order's sharpest passage: "In effect, President Trump argues that once he declared the Letter a 'fake,' Defendants should have disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story. But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment." The court added that the article printed the denial, and that letting readers judge for themselves makes a malice inference less plausible, not more.

The investigation. The court found the article itself described "a thoughtful and detailed investigation": outreach to Trump and his team, to Justice Department officials who did not respond, to the FBI which declined comment, to Maxwell who did not reply, and to others named in the album including Leslie Wexner and Alan Dershowitz, plus people involved in binding the book. The argument that the reporters only reviewed the letter rather than keeping a copy drew a flat answer: nothing in the law required them to obtain, retain or publish one. The Maxwell theory fared worse. Trump's own pleading alleged Maxwell said she did not remember him submitting a letter, which, the court reasoned, meant she "had little to offer."

The omissions and the follow-up article. How the voiceover was typed, and how it was confirmed to be in the third person, were "inconsequential details." Editorial selection is not malice. And the claim that the September 2025 visual-analysis piece proved the signature could not match was, the court said, hard to square with a piece containing several examples of similarity.

The court dismissed with prejudice because "this is President Trump's second attempt to allege his claims," citing a 2025 Eleventh Circuit decision affirming a with-prejudice defamation dismissal after two failed pleadings. In a footnote, it added an independent ground for the per quod count: reputational harm is not special damage, so that count would fail regardless.

What the Law Actually Says

Every piece of this ruling runs through one rule, and it is worth seeing it in its original form. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), the Supreme Court held that the Constitution "prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with 'actual malice'," which the Court defined as publishing "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." That passage sits at pages 279 to 280 of the opinion, and later cases extended it from public officials to public figures generally. Nobody disputed that a sitting president is a public figure, and the court noted as much.

Two features of that standard do most of the work here, and they are the same two that decide most newsroom cases. We walk through both in our guide to when a public figure can actually win a defamation case.

First, actual malice is subjective. It asks what the publisher believed, not what a careful publisher should have done. The Eleventh Circuit frames it as whether the defendant "actually entertained serious doubts as to the veracity of the published account, or was highly aware that the account was probably false." Sloppiness, bias, a rushed deadline and a departure from good journalistic practice are not enough on their own. The Supreme Court said in St. Amant v. Thompson, 390 U.S. 727, 732 (1968), that malice can sometimes be inferred, for example where a story is fabricated, rests wholly on an unverified anonymous call, or is so inherently improbable that only a reckless person would circulate it. The court did not find any of those circumstances established here. The amended complaint did assert that no authentic letter exists and that the reporters concocted the story, but the court treated allegations of that kind as conclusory rather than as facts entitled to a presumption of truth. And while failure to investigate alone does not show malice, Harte-Hanks Communications v. Connaughton, 491 U.S. 657 (1989), holds that purposeful avoidance of the truth is a different category. The court found no non-conclusory facts suggesting purposeful avoidance.

Second, and this is the part that changed defamation litigation in this circuit, actual malice must be plausibly pleaded before discovery. The court quoted Michel v. NYP Holdings, Inc., 816 F.3d 686, 702 (11th Cir. 2016), for the proposition that "[t]he costs and efforts required to defend a lawsuit through [discovery] could chill free speech nearly as effectively as the absence of the actual malice standard altogether." Under Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009), conclusory allegations get no presumption of truth. Put those together and a public-figure plaintiff has to plead concrete facts about the publisher's state of mind at a stage when the plaintiff has not yet seen a single internal email. That is the structural reason these cases so often end at the pleading stage, and it is worth understanding before anyone considers filing a defamation complaint of their own.

Why the court did not pick a state's law

The parties disagreed about whether Florida or New York law governs. The court did not resolve it. Sitting in diversity in Florida, it applied Florida choice-of-law rules, under which a court "need not resolve a choice-of-law dispute if there is a false conflict, such that the different laws point to the same outcome under the facts of the case." Because the parties agreed that Florida and New York defamation law are the same for purposes of this motion, the court declined to choose.

For the defamation elements it therefore used the Florida formulation: publication, falsity, the requisite fault, actual damages, and a defamatory statement. The distinction between per se and per quod also comes from Florida's defamation case law. A per quod claim needs extra explanation to show the defamatory meaning, and because of that it requires special damages, meaning realized out-of-pocket loss proven as to time, cause and amount. The amended complaint pleaded "lost profits, out of pocket losses, and realized losses in the form of reputational harm." Reputational harm is a general damage, not a special one, and the rest was too conclusory. Readers trying to understand what defamation plaintiffs can actually recover may find our breakdown of defamation damages and how they are valued useful on exactly this distinction.

The anti-SLAPP fee question the court left open

The defendants asked for attorneys' fees under anti-SLAPP law, and the court agreed the claims "lack merit." It still did not award anything, and the reason is a genuine unsettled question rather than a scheduling matter.

Florida's statute, Fla. Stat. 768.295, is titled "Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) prohibited." Subsection (3) bars filing a claim against someone "without merit and primarily because such person or entity has exercised the constitutional right of free speech in connection with a public issue." Subsection (4) gives the target "a right to an expeditious resolution," lets that party "move the court for an order dismissing the action," and says the court "shall award the prevailing party reasonable attorney fees and costs incurred in connection with a claim that an action was filed in violation of this section." Federal courts in the Southern District of Florida have read that fee provision as something a defendant can pursue by motion.

New York's scheme reads differently. Civil Rights Law 76-a defines an "action involving public petition and participation" broadly, covering communications in a public forum on an issue of public interest. Civil Rights Law 70-a then says that a defendant in such an action "may maintain an action, claim, cross claim or counterclaim to recover damages, including costs and attorney's fees." Several federal district courts have seized on that language to hold that section 70-a does not authorize a bare fee motion in federal court, because the statute contemplates the defendant affirmatively maintaining a claim. The order cites a September 2026 Southern District of New York decision collecting those cases.

So the court reserved jurisdiction, gave the defendants 30 days from October 31, 2026 to file a fee motion under Local Rule 7.3, and required that the motion include a choice-of-law discussion. In other words, the choice-of-law question the court avoided for the merits has to be answered for the money.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The legally interesting part of this order is not that a public-figure defamation claim failed on actual malice. That is the ordinary outcome. It is why the door was shut permanently, and the answer is procedural rather than substantive.

Read the with-prejudice reasoning closely and it does not say the claim is unsalvageable in principle. It says the plaintiff had two chances. That is a repetition rationale, and it lands harder here because of what happened in between. In May 2026 the court denied leave to take limited discovery on actual malice before amending. The second complaint was therefore drafted from the same public record as the first. A plaintiff in that position has very little new to add about a publisher's internal state of mind, which is precisely the material actual malice requires. The Eleventh Circuit's pleading-stage rule and the denial of pre-amendment discovery, taken together, produce a system where the second attempt is very likely to look like the first. Whether that combination is a feature protecting publishers from the cost of discovery or a trap for plaintiffs is the real question, and it is squarely teed up for appeal.

The second thing worth flagging is how carefully the court avoided the factual dispute. It refused to incorporate the produced Birthday Book because authenticity is contested. It refused to rule the article true. It said authorship of the letter is a jury question. A reader looking for judicial vindication of either side on whether Trump wrote that letter will not find it in this order, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not read past the disposition line. The ruling is about pleading, not about the letter.

Third, the anti-SLAPP passage is a small window onto a genuinely messy area. Anti-SLAPP statutes were built for state court. Whether their fee-shifting and special-motion machinery survives transplant into federal court under the Erie doctrine has split the federal courts for years, and the New York and Florida statutes happen to fail or survive that transplant for different textual reasons. The court's instruction to brief choice of law for fees is an acknowledgment that the same lawsuit may be fee-shifting or not depending on which state's statute attaches. That is an uncomfortable amount of outcome variance for a provision meant to deter meritless suits uniformly.

Finally, context. The actual-malice standard is under live pressure. There is a separate, ongoing effort asking the Supreme Court to revisit Sullivan, which we covered in our report on the push to overturn the actual-malice rule. This order is a clean illustration of what that standard does in practice: it ended a high-profile case before a single deposition, on the strength of the published article itself. That is the design. Whether the design should survive is a different argument, and it is not one this court was asked to have.

We are not predicting how the Eleventh Circuit will handle the appeal, and nobody reading tea leaves should either.

How This Affects You

If you are a public figure considering a defamation claim. The hardest part is not proving the statement was false. It is pleading, before you have any discovery, specific facts showing the publisher subjectively doubted the story. Your own pre-publication denial does not do it. In this circuit, neither does a list of investigative steps you think the reporter should have taken.

If you are a journalist or publisher. The behaviors that saved the defendants here are documentable and ordinary: seeking comment from the subject, contacting the agencies involved, reaching out to named third parties, printing the denial prominently, and telling readers plainly what the reporting could not establish. The court treated the article's own hedge, that it was not clear how the letter was prepared, as evidence against malice. Transparency about the limits of your reporting is a litigation asset.

If you are a private individual. None of this applies to you in the same way. A private plaintiff suing over a statement on a matter of private concern generally has to show only negligence, not actual malice. The gap between those two standards is enormous, and it is the first thing to establish before anything else. Establishing which category you fall into is the first thing any defamation analysis has to settle.

If you are deciding whether to sue in state or federal court. This order is a reminder that the forum can determine whether the other side can recover its legal fees from you, because anti-SLAPP fee provisions do not travel into federal court uniformly. That is a question to resolve before filing, not after losing.

What Happens Next

The appeal is the live proceeding. Trump's November 4, 2026 notice invoked 28 U.S.C. 1291 and appealed from the October 31 order "and from all prior orders and rulings that merge into that final disposition," which would include the May 22, 2026 denial of limited actual-malice discovery. The Eleventh Circuit docketed the case as No. 26-14110-A on November 5, 2026 and issued its civil docketing notice the next day. That notice sets the usual opening obligations, including that if no transcripts are ordered the appellant's brief is due 40 days after November 5, 2026. Briefing schedules in the Eleventh Circuit commonly move, so treat that as a default rather than a fixed date.

On fees, the district court expressly reserved jurisdiction and set a 30-day window from October 31, 2026 for a motion that must address choice of law. That window extends to roughly the end of November 2026. We could not load the full public docket on November 13, 2026, and among the entries we could retrieve the latest was the Eleventh Circuit docketing notice entered November 6, 2026. We therefore take no position on whether a fee motion has been filed. If one is filed and granted, it would raise the separate question of how a fee award interacts with a pending appeal.

Nothing here is settled appellate law. A district court order can be reconsidered, amended, or reversed, and this one is on direct review.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. This article summarizes court filings and statutes as of November 13, 2026 and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Defamation law varies by state, deadlines are short and unforgiving, and the outcome of any particular dispute depends on facts not described here. Consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before acting.

Related articles

• Can a Public Figure Sue for Defamation?
• Defamation Laws: Complete Guide
• Florida Defamation Laws
• How to Sue for Defamation of Character
• How Much Can You Sue for Defamation?
• The Push to Overturn the Actual-Malice Standard
• Combs v. NewsNation and the Actual-Malice Pleading Bar

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Last updated: 2026-11-13. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-11-13.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the court rule that The Wall Street Journal's story was true?

No. The court expressly declined to decide. The defendants asked it to find the article true and non-defamatory as a matter of law, and it refused both requests, holding instead that the case failed on actual malice alone. The order states that whether Trump authored the letter is a question of fact that cannot be determined on a motion to dismiss (ECF No. 80 at 13). It also refused to treat the letter page produced to the House Oversight Committee as authenticated, because that authenticity is disputed.

What does 'dismissed with prejudice' mean here?

It means the claims in this lawsuit are over at the district court level and cannot be refiled there. The court's stated reason was repetition: this was the second complaint, and the first had already been dismissed on April 13, 2026 for the same failure. It does not mean an appellate court has approved that result. The dismissal is on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit.

What is the actual-malice standard, exactly?

It comes from New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964). A public official or public figure cannot recover for a defamatory falsehood unless the statement was made with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not. It is a subjective test about what the publisher actually believed, not an objective test about what a reasonable journalist would have done.

Why was publishing over Trump's denial not enough to show malice?

Because the standard asks whether the publisher doubted its own story, not whether the subject objected. The court reasoned that if a denial alone compelled a publisher to drop a story, any public figure could block unfavorable reporting simply by denying it. It also noted that the article printed the denial, which the Eleventh Circuit treats as cutting against malice rather than supporting it.

Does a weak or incomplete investigation prove actual malice?

Not by itself. Eleventh Circuit precedent holds that a departure from reasonable journalistic standards is not enough, and that failure to investigate standing alone does not establish malice. A plaintiff must show the defendant deliberately avoided investigating in order to evade learning the truth. The court found no non-conclusory allegations of that kind here.

Which state's law applied, Florida's or New York's?

The court did not decide. Applying Florida choice-of-law rules, it found a false conflict, meaning Florida and New York defamation law point to the same result on this motion, so it declined to resolve the dispute. It used the Florida formulation of the defamation elements for the analysis. The question is still open for the fee dispute, which is why the court ordered any fee motion to include a choice-of-law discussion.

Have the defendants been awarded attorneys' fees?

Not as of the record we were able to verify on November 13, 2026. The court agreed the claims lack merit but reserved jurisdiction rather than ruling, because it was unclear whether Florida's anti-SLAPP statute or New York's applies and the two differ on whether a fee request can even be made by motion in federal court. The court set a 30-day deadline from October 31, 2026 for such a motion. We could not reach the full public docket, so we do not state whether one has been filed.

Why do the two anti-SLAPP statutes behave differently in federal court?

Text. Florida's statute, Fla. Stat. 768.295(4), lets a target move the court for dismissal and says the court shall award the prevailing party reasonable fees, and federal courts in Florida have allowed fee requests by motion. New York Civil Rights Law 70-a instead says a defendant 'may maintain an action, claim, cross claim or counterclaim' to recover costs and fees, and several federal courts have read that to require an affirmative claim rather than a motion.

What happens now in the Eleventh Circuit?

The appeal was docketed on November 5, 2026 as No. 26-14110-A. Standard appellate briefing follows, with the opening brief ordinarily due 40 days after docketing if no transcripts are ordered, though those dates frequently shift. The appeal covers the October 31, 2026 dismissal and the earlier orders that merged into it, including the denial of limited discovery on actual malice. No appellate ruling exists yet.