President Donald Trump filed an amended complaint in his defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal in an effort to prove that the reporters published a birthday letter Trump allegedly wrote to Jeffrey Epstein with actual malice.
Obama-appointed judge Darrin P. Gayles of the Southern District of Florida had dismissed Trump’s original complaint in the defamation case, saying Trump had not properly demonstrated actual malice in his allegations. Trump is suing the outlet over its decision to publish the alleged crass birthday letter to Epstein from 2003, maintaining that he never wrote the letter, while the Wall Street Journal has defended its reporting.
Trump re-filed the lawsuit on Wednesday ahead of Gayles’s imposed deadline for a revised complaint. In this filing, Trump’s lawyers include over four pages of points regarding why the president believes the reporters published the article containing the letter with actual malice.
Trump’s lawyers wrote that several omitted details should prove actual malice in the eyes of the court, including the omission of how the defendants obtained a copy of the alleged birthday letter, if and how the contents of the letter were verified, and why the publication did not include an image of the letter in the July 2025 article.
The outlet reported that the alleged birthday letter, detailed in its story, was part of an album of letters from friends and acquaintances that Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, compiled for his 50th birthday. The outlet wrote that the letter and album came before Epstein was first arrested on sex crime charges. Trump’s lawyers flagged in the amended complaint that the outlet did not include Maxwell’s perspective.
“In addition, Defendants’ actual malice is demonstrated by their failure to either include what Maxwell told them in their interview or consultation with her, or the intentional refusal to interview Maxwell during Defendants’ newsgathering process,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the amended complaint. “Defendants’ failure to disclose what Maxwell told them, or refusal to speak with Maxwell about the alleged letter, plausibly infers that Defendants purposefully avoided whether the Defamatory Statements were true.”
In the online version of the outlet’s article, the Wall Street Journal wrote that “Maxwell didn’t respond to a letter requesting an interview sent to her in prison,” and that her lawyer, Arthur Aidala, provided them with the following statement: “At this point, she is focused on her case before the Supreme Court of the United States.”
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Maxwell is currently in federal prison in Texas serving a 20-year sentence for her child sex trafficking conviction.
Trump, who has stated that he cut off ties with Epstein years before Epstein’s initial arrest, is seeking no less than $10 billion in financial and reputational damages from the defendants.