Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, its parent company, owner and two reporters claiming libel and slander for publishing an article saying the future president wrote a lewd letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.
Trump filed the lawsuit in Miami federal court on July 18 and named as the plaintiffs Dow Jones & Company, News Corporation, owner Rupert Murdoch and reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo. A copy of the lawsuit was not attached to the case’s docket.
At issue is a story published July 17 describing a letter from Trump that the Journal wrote was part of a leather-bound birthday book with dozens of other letters that was presented to Epstein in 2003. Trump’s letter ends with “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the Journal.
According to the Journal, Trump’s signature on the letter, which was written in the form of text inside a hand-drawn outline of a nude woman, is “a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”
Soon after the publication of the article, Trump called the letter a “FAKE” in a social media post and said the story is “false, malicious, and defamatory.”
The Wall Street Journal did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the lawsuit from USA TODAY.
Trump also announced in another social media post after the Journal story’s publication that he is directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce more Epstein documents amid public clamor for the records. Federal prosecutors followed up with a motion filed July 18 in federal court in Manhattan seeking to unseal grand jury transcripts in the criminal cases against Epstein and his former associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Last week, Trump lashed out at a reporter for asking questions about Epstein a day after the Justice Department and the FBI released a memo declaring the disgraced financier died by suicide in 2019 and also that investigators had found no evidence Epstein kept a “client list.”
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” Trump asked the reporter. “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time?”
Trump’s association with Epstein , whom he knew socially, has dogged him since his first term in office. In 2019, Trump said he’d had a “falling out” with Epstein, whom he described as a “Palm Beach fixture,” in the mid-2000s.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump sues WSJ and owner Rupert Murdoch over Epstein story
