A protest art installation featuring “The Epstein Birthday Card” at the National Mall in Washington, DC, on January 21. Olivier Douliery/Sipa via AP

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Sometimes there’s no smoking gun, but there’s the smell of gunpowder.

That seems to be the case with Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump gang’s handling of the scandal looks as if it is purposefully designed to raise suspicions. Fighting the release of the Epstein files, declaring this whole subject ought to be dropped, and, of course, Trump’s contradictory statements about his relationship with Epstein—it all comes across as fishy and suggests guilt of…something. Last week, the news emerged that in 2006, when sex crime charges against Epstein in Palm Beach became public, Trump called the city’s police chief and said, “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this.” Yet after Epstein was arrested on federal charges in 2019, Trump said he had known nothing of Epstein’s abuse of teenage girls: “I had no idea.”

Was he lying about what he knew back in the day? This—shall we say?—contradiction is hard to square. But it’s a good indication that nothing Trump claims about Epstein should be believed. Remember the birthday card? In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that a birthday album Ghislaine Maxwell prepared for Epstein in 2003 contained a greeting from Trump: A drawing of a naked female body with an imagined dialogue between “Jeffrey” and “Donald” that ended, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump’s signature mimicked pubic hair in the crotch of the figure.

Trump insisted this birthday message was a “fake thing.” He said, “I never wrote a picture in my life.” That was false; he had drawn sketches that were sold at auctions. And he said he was “gonna sue the Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else.”

That seemed like one of his many phony-baloney threats. After all, the Journal had found this Trump drawing in an album with well wishes from dozens of Epstein associates. It seemed legit. Would Trump really sue? Perhaps he felt emboldened by the settlements he had wrung out of ABC News and CBS News for the bogus cases he filed against them.

He indeed sued the Wall Street Journal, the reporters who wrote the story, and right-wing media titan Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corps owns the newspaper. He claimed the article had defamed him.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in southern Florida, contends that no such “authentic letter or drawing exists,” and it charges that the Wall Street Journal “concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.” (This implies the birthday message was forged by someone, but the lawsuit presents no evidence of that.) Trump argues this article “resulted in overwhelming financial and reputational” harm for him. He demands at least $10 billion in damages.

The case proceeded with various motions—even after the House Government Oversight Committee released a full version of the Epstein birthday album it had received from the Epstein estate, which contained the Trump drawing. And Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal submitted a reply to Trump’s complaint with a motion to dismiss the case.

This reply hasn’t received much attention. Yet it should, for in the filing, Murdoch et al. argue that Trump is too lewd a person to suffer reputational harm from this story. To prove this, Murdoch relies on the infamous Access Hollywood video in which Trump boasted that due to his celebrity status he could sexually assault women.

Yes, Murdoch, whose Fox News and New York Post provide the most prominent media platforms for slavish Trump worship, says Trump is such a lout that an association with an affectionate note to a sex criminal cannot tarnish his public image.

In this filing, Murdoch’s legal team offers several arguments to counter Trump’s claim. It notes first and foremost that the WSJ article was accurate and points to the release of the birthday album by the congressional committee as proof of that. The attorneys say there was “nothing defamatory about a person sending a bawdy note to a friend,” highlighting that three months before the birthday book was presented to Epstein, New York magazine quoted Trump saying he had known Epstein for 15 years and believed he was a “terrific” guy who was “a lot of fun to be with” and liked “beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” And the Murdoch retort states that there had been no malice—a prerequisite for winning a defamation case against a public figure—which only exists when a defendant has reason to believe the story is false.

Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal’s response rips the hide off Trump’s case on many levels. For instance, it contends, rather reasonably, that reporting Trump was pals with Epstein before Epstein was busted is not defamatory. But the killer argument is that the WSJ article was “consistent with plaintiff’s reputation.” Trump, Murdoch’s lawyers maintain, “admitted to instances of using bawdy language when discussing women. Plaintiff thus cannot allege that the Article damaged his reputation.”

“Bawdy” is doing a lot of work here. Murdoch’s lawyers could have gone with “sleazy” or “lecherous” or “misogynist.” But they landed on a Benny Hill-ish description that’s less offensive in tone. 

Murdoch asks the court to “take judicial notice of both the extensive public reporting of [Trump’s] past comments” and notes that Trump “has a well-documented reputation for bawdiness based on his past statements about women.” The complaint serves up examples starting with Trump’s infamous remark: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

It continues:

President Trump also has a well-documented history (over which he has never sued) of making bawdy comments in venues like The Howard Stern Show and elsewhere. In 1991, Plaintiff gave an interview with Esquire, in which he stated, “[I]t really doesn’t matter what [the media] write[s] as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” In 2006, on Larry King Live, Plaintiff referred to actress Angelina Jolie as having “been with so many guys she makes me look like a baby[.]” Any allegation that President Trump wrote a bawdy birthday note is thus consistent with his public reputation—which he has himself acknowledged—for using “locker room” talk and does not plausibly state any harm.

The complaint includes as an exhibit a list of quotes from Trump assembled by Politico in 2015 that included a remark he made in 1992: “Women, you have to treat ’em like shit.” The Murdoch response further argues that there was no reason for the reporters and the newspaper to doubt the article’s accuracy—which would be necessary for proving malice—“because it was entirely consistent with President Trump’s reputation.”

Bottom line: Trump is precisely the kind of guy who would have hobnobbed with Epstein, not been put off or alarmed by Epstein’s interest in younger women, and sent him a message like this one.

Murdoch asked the court to kick the lawsuit to the curb:

This case calls out for dismissal. In an affront to the First Amendment, the President of the United States brought this lawsuit to silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public. By its very nature, this meritless lawsuit threatens to chill the speech of those who dare to publish content that the President does not like.

In October, Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, replied. His filing requests that the court toss out all the exhibits that chronicled Trump’s lewd and misogynistic remarks, asserting that these “random instances” did not render Trump “impervious to harm.” It insists there was no evidence Trump “actually wrote and signed the letter or sent it” and claims the Journal article was “clearly calculated to subject President Trump to hatred, disgust, ridicule, contempt or disgrace.” The story, Trump’s mouthpiece maintains, was part of a “deliberate smear campaign.”

A hearing on the case was held in December. As of this week, Judge Darrin Gayles, an Obama appointee, had rendered no decision on Murdoch’s request for a dismissal.

This lawsuit could be seen as a sideshow to the ongoing Epstein mess. But it shows the length that Trump will go to in order to wipe away the Epstein stain. He might have said, “Yeah, as we all know, I did socialize with Epstein before his crimes were revealed and, like many others, contributed to an album compiled for his birthday—before I dumped him and kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago.” A stance like that would likely not have caused Trump that much trouble, given there’s already plenty of creepy images and videos of Trump hanging with Epstein at that time. Instead, Trump seems to be denying the undeniable.

His lawsuit is a case of Trump protesting too much, as well as a threat to the First Amendment. And it’s a tad ironic that Murdoch, whose media empire has done so much to elevate and protect Trump, now defends the Journal’s reporting by depicting Trump—accurately—as a vile misogynist. Or as his lawyers put it, “bawdy.”

There are still questions lingering about Trump and Epstein. What did Trump know and when did he know it? If this case isn’t derailed, there will be discovery. That means Trump will sit for a deposition, and, finally, he will have to answer those questions