WASHINGTON — President Trump sued the writer of The Wall Avenue Journal for $10 billion over an allegedly “faux” and “defamatory” article that claimed he despatched a lewd letter, with the drawn define of a unadorned lady, to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein for his fiftieth birthday.
Information Corp, its chair emeritus Rupert Murdoch and chief government Robert Thomson; Dow Jones, the Journal’s writer; and the reporters who authored the report have been named as defendants within the go well with filed Friday in federal court docket within the Southern District of Florida.
A Dow Jones spokesperson responded: “Now we have full confidence within the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and can vigorously defend towards any lawsuit.” Reps for Information Corp didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The go well with, which seeks $10 billion in damages, said “no genuine letter or drawing exists” displaying Trump, 79, utilizing “salacious language” to want Epstein a cheerful fiftieth birthday in 2003.
“To try and inextricably hyperlink President Trump to Epstein, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely declare that the salacious language of the letter is contained inside a hand-drawn bare lady, which was created with a heavy marker,” wrote Trump’s legal professional Alejandro Brito.
The report goes on to “present a collection of quotes from the nonexistent letter, claiming that the letter was written in third individual, starting with a voice over interluding a dialog, adopted by a purported dialogue between President Trump and Epstein — as in the event that they have been characters in a play.”
Brito additionally accused the Journal of attempting to “falsely symbolize as undeniable fact that President Trump drew the bare lady’s breasts and signed his title ‘Donald’ under her waist, ‘mimicking pubic hair.’”
“Defendants concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively painting him in a false gentle,” the go well with alleged.
Epstein, 66, dedicated suicide in a Manhattan jail on Aug. 10, 2019, after being arrested and charged with intercourse trafficking and abusing dozens of younger women at his houses in New York and Florida.
Epstein’s loss of life — and the financier’s associations with highly effective politicians, titans of enterprise and different world leaders — have lengthy been the topic of frenzied hypothesis that he was half of a bigger, shadowy intercourse trafficking ring of extremely influential figures.
Trump stated throughout his 2024 marketing campaign that he’d have “no downside” releasing investigatory findings associated to the DOJ’s prosecution of Epstein if elected — together with a purported “consumer checklist” — saying he was “not concerned” and “by no means went to his island” of Little St. James, the place the pedophile allegedly abused his underage victims.
However a July 6 memo from Trump’s Justice Division and FBI concluded a “systematic assessment” of proof discovered “no incriminating ‘consumer checklist,’” “no credible proof … that Epstein blackmailed outstanding people as a part of his actions” and no “proof that might predicate an investigation towards uncharged third events.”
Calls from a few of the forty seventh president’s supporters — together with each right-wing media influencers and Republican leaders in Congress — for extra transparency prompted Trump on Thursday to ask Lawyer Normal Pam Bondi to unseal another “pertinent Grand Jury testimony” associated to the Epstein case.
The next day, the DOJ moved to launch that proof, saying the “intense public scrutiny” warranted it.
