But gave him time to refile it.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A Florida judge dismissed President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal newspaper. Trump accused the newspaper of defaming him in an article about his connections with the late financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, writes the BBC.
District Judge Darrin Gayles stated that Trump in his lawsuit "did not even come close to showing" that the newspaper acted with malicious intent towards him — which in the US is a mandatory condition for an accusation of defamation.
The judge gave Trump time until April 27 to rephrase the lawsuit and refile it. A member of Trump's legal team told the BBC that they would do so.
"[The President] will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in fake news and misinform the American people," the lawyer stated.
Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, its owner News Corporation, and the corporation's head Rupert Murdoch for an article from July 17 last year, which stated that Epstein's 2003 birthday greeting album also contained a greeting from Trump.
This greeting, as the newspaper wrote, was written over an image of a naked female body.
A few weeks later, Democratic members of Congress published a copy of this message. The newspaper did not publish the image in its article but provided a verbal description, which exactly matched the picture published by the congressmen.
Donald Trump stated that it was a fake, and that he neither wrote nor drew any greeting to Epstein.
Trump does not deny that he was friends with Epstein for over 10 years, but claims that he fell out with him at the very beginning of the 2000s.
According to American law, a plaintiff claiming defamation must demonstrate the presence of "actual malice," meaning they must simultaneously prove that the public statement they are complaining about was false, and that the author of the statement knew or should have known it was false.
Judge Gayles wrote in the order dismissing Trump's lawsuit that the president "did not convincingly prove that the defendants published the article with actual malice."
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