President Trump on Wednesday refiled his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal over an article about a birthday book greeting to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A judge had dismissed Mr. Trump’s previous complaint.
The amended complaint, like the original, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Judge Darrin P. Gayles had thrown out Mr. Trump’s first lawsuit in April, saying that the president had not plausibly shown that The Journal published the article with “actual malice,” a legal standard that must be met by public officials in defamation cases. To meet that standard, the publication had to have either known that what it was publishing was false or acted with reckless disregard to the truth.
Judge Gayles had given Mr. Trump until Wednesday to refile.
The lawsuit centers on a Journal article published on July 17 that described a letter and a drawing of a naked woman that appeared to be signed by Mr. Trump in a 2003 birthday album compiled for Mr. Epstein. The message read, in part: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
The article said that the letter had been reviewed by The Journal, and it included Mr. Trump’s denial. A copy of the birthday book was later given by lawyers for Mr. Epstein’s estate to the House Oversight Committee, which publicly released a redacted copy that included the letter.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers have argued that the letter was not written or signed by Mr. Trump. In the amended complaint, they argued that The Journal and its reporters showed actual malice by not explaining in the article how the letter was obtained and how its contents were verified.
They also argued that the reporters should have included a denial from Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted associate of Mr. Epstein’s who compiled the birthday book. The Journal article said that Ms. Maxwell did not respond to a letter requesting an interview sent to her in prison. After the article was published, Ms. Maxwell told the Department of Justice that she had no recollection of receiving a letter from Mr. Trump for the book.
The lawyers said that Mr. Trump called Rupert Murdoch, the founder of News Corp, the parent company of The Journal, before the article was published and told him that he had not signed or sent the letter, to which Mr. Murdoch said, “I will handle it,” according to the complaint. Mr. Trump believed he meant that the article would not be published, the complaint added.
Mr. Murdoch declined to comment.
The suit named as defendants The Journal’s parent company, News Corp; Mr. Murdoch; Robert Thomson, News Corp’s chief executive; Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher; and two Journal reporters as defendants.
A Dow Jones spokeswoman pointed to a previous statement on the lawsuit that said, “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
