Two months ago, President Donald Trump sued The Wall Street Journal for defamation after the newspaper reported that he had contributed to a 2003 collection of messages marking the 50th birthday of financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was later charged with sex trafficking involving underage girls. Trump called that report a "scam" and a "fake story," and his defamation complaint implied that the birthday letter attributed to him did not exist.
The Journal article "does not attach the purported letter [and] does not identify the purported drawing," says the complaint, which Trump filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on July 18. "Tellingly, the Article does not explain whether Defendants have obtained a copy of the letter, have seen it, have had it described to them, or any other circumstances that would otherwise lend credibility to the Article. That is because the supposed letter is a fake and the Defendants knew it when they chose to deliberately defame President Trump."
On Monday, the House Oversight Committee released a copy of that "fake" letter, along with a redacted version of the three-volume album that included it, which the committee obtained from Epstein's estate via subpoena. Trump still insists he did not write the letter or sketch the outline of a nude woman that surrounds it. But whether or not that's true, his lawsuit faces another hurdle that may be hard to overcome: Trump has to show that the Journal's report was not just false but also defamatory, meaning it damaged his reputation.
-copy-dd1f2bf0.jpeg?w=600)
