Trump's lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch goes off in strange directions
The lawsuit suggests the Wall Street Journal's bombshell wasn't an "exclusive" because it was public—and claims it's defamatory to say Trump was Epstein's friend.
That Donald Trump sued Rupert Murdoch over the Wall Street Journal’s bombshell story about the leather-bound book that Jeffrey Epstein received from his close friends for his 50th birthday isn’t particularly surprising.
After all, the Journal’s article reported that Trump threatened to sue the paper for writing that he wrote Epstein a letter in 2003, featuring a drawing of a naked woman with his name mimicking pubic hair. The new lawsuit calls the letter “nonexistent,” setting the stage for the likely exposure of a letter that so far has only been described but not seen. The Journal describes the letter containing an imagined conversation between Trump and Epstein, which ends with a send-off: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Setting aside its main focus, Trump’s lawsuit veers off into odd directions.
In one paragraph, his lawyer Alejandro Brito offers a strange definition of a journalistic “exclusive.”
“The Article was published in The Wall Street Journal as an exclusive,” the complaint says. “However, since publication, Defendants have widely disseminated it to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.”
The lawsuit says it was “implicitly defamatory” for the Journal to report that Trump was Epstein’s “friend” or “pal,” but Trump spoke about his then-15-year-old relationship with Epstein in a New York Magazine profile from 2003.
“Terrific guy,” Trump said of the pedophile. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
NBC News infamously captured footage of Trump and Epstein partying at Mar-a-Lago in 1992. In the footage, unearthed after Epstein’s arrest, Trump appears to point at women on the dance floor and pat one of them on her backside.
Through the lawsuit, Trump has invited scrutiny about his relationship with Epstein in court. The newspaper’s parent company Dow Jones expressed full confidence in their reporting, which suggests that the letter could come to light and be authenticated during litigation.
Check out my analysis of the new lawsuit on CNN’s Laura Coates Live and Brian Tyler Cohen’s YouTube page.
Brian and I unpack the lawsuit and its ramifications at greater length here.
A quick correction of one of my comments in the video: The photograph of Trump and E. Jean Carroll that I cited shows him with his then-wife Ivana Trump, not Marla Maples. In a deposition, Trump infamously confused Carroll with Maples, his second wife. The mix-up was especially damaging for Trump because he claimed that Carroll was “not his type.”
You can read the 18-page lawsuit in full here.
Let’s hope Trump meets his Waterloo soon. It’s about time!
Excellent discussion with BTC. Thanks, Adam.