Trump Sues The Wall Street Journal for Daring to Report on His Lewd Birthday Card to Jeffrey Epstein

Jul 18, 2025

Facing a rebellion from his own supporters over the administration’s failure to release more information about Jeffrey Epstein, a financier who died in jail after being accused of sexually exploiting underage girls, Donald Trump is now attempting to prevent the media from reporting on his long friendship with Epstein. How? By suing, of course!

The New York Times reports:

President Trump on Friday accused Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal of defaming him in an article about a lewd birthday greeting that the publication said Mr. Trump had sent to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein decades ago.
In a suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Mr. Trump said the article “falsely claimed that he authored, drew and signed” the note to Mr. Epstein.
The complaint claimed that “given the timing” of the article, “the overwhelming financial and reputational harm suffered by President Trump will continue to multiply.” It asked for awarded damages “not to be less than $10 billion.”
The suit named as defendants The Journal’s parent company, News Corp; Mr. Murdoch, News Corp’s founder and former chairman; Robert Thomson, News Corp’s chief executive; Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal; and two Journal reporters.

It would be easy to regard such a frivolous lawsuit as futile; Trump’s close connection to Epstein has been known for a long time. Yet Trump has already succeeded in using this tactic to intimidate other media outlets. As the Times notes:

Mr. Trump routinely berates journalists and news organizations, and has increasingly used legal threats and actual litigation against media outlets. His lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” report on CBS News resulted in a $16 million settlement with Paramount this month. Last year, ABC News agreed to settle a defamation suit brought by Mr. Trump for $15 million, plus $1 million for his legal fees. He recently threatened to sue The New York Times and CNN over their reporting about the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

The context of the Epstein case is a particular reminder of what these threats of litigation are intended to accomplish. They are a method for Trump to deter all but the most well-funded and assertive news outlets and suppress any facts that contradict his preferred narrative.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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