The Wall Street Journal’s legal team also risked raising the president’s ire by stating the obvious: the letter, as depicted by the press, is “consistent with [Trump’s] reputation,” citing comments the commander-in-chief has previously made about his relationship with Epstein and his views on women.
The Wall Street Journal and its parent companies, Dow Jones and News Corp, have asked a court to dismiss President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit, filed shortly after the Journal published a story on letters purportedly penned by Trump to his former friend, Jeffrey Epstein.
According to NBC News, the Journal’s motion states that nothing it published was fictitious, exaggerated, or otherwise known to be untrue.
“The Birthday Book as produced by the Epstein estate and later publicly released by the House Oversight Committee contains a letter identical to the one described in the Article,” the Journal’s motion to dismiss states.
The filing further alleges that nothing written in the article meets the legal standard for defamation, as “there is nothing defamatory about a person sending a bawdy note to a friend, and the Article cannot damage Plaintiff’s reputation as a matter of law.”
“The Complaint should be dismissed with prejudice, and the Court should award Defendants their reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs,” the motion says.
Trump, who filed the lawsuit in a Florida-based federal court in Florida, has taken a different stance, arguing that the letter’s contents are so inflammatory that he has incurred billions of dollars in damages. He also maintains that the letter itself is either fraudulent or altered, claiming that the signature simply is not his.
The article “falsely pass[es] off as a fact that President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter.” However, attorneys for the Journal have since said that the original article “does not assert as a matter of fact that [Trump] personally signed the letter or drew the image.”
The Wall Street Journal’s legal team also risked raising the president’s ire by stating the obvious: the letter, as depicted by the press, is “consistent with [Trump’s] reputation,” citing comments the commander-in-chief has previously made about his relationship with Epstein and his views on women.
“Because Plaintiff has publicly admitted that he was Epstein’s friends in the early 2000s, his reputation cannot be harmed by the suggestion that he was friends with Epstein in 2003,” the motion to dismiss claims. “Indeed, he was listed in the Birthday Book as a ‘friend’ of Epstein. The fact that his relationship with Epstein may now be a political liability—over 20 years after the Birthday Book was presented to Epstein—does not change this conclusion.”
“President Trump has a reputation both for being friendly with Epstein in 2003 and for making bawdy statements about women,” attorneys for the Journal wrote. “Plaintiff will, therefore, never be able to establish the Defendants acted with knowing falsity in publishing the Article. In the end, of course, it turns out the Article was not false at all, as confirmed by the House Oversight Committee’s release of the Birthday Book.”
The Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch, the conservative behemoth behind Fox News, has since called Trump’s lawsuit “an affront of the First Amendment.”
“[T]he President of the United States brought this lawsuit to silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public. By its very nature, this meritless lawsuit threatens to chill the speech of those who dare to publish content that the President does not like,” the motion alleges. “This lawsuit should not be permitted to proceed.”
Sources
WSJ moves to dismiss Trump’s $10B lawsuit over alleged letter in Epstein birthday book
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