Left: President Donald Trump speaks to the White House Religious Liberty Commission during an event at the Museum of the Bible, Monday, Sept. 8, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Evan Vucci). Right: Rupert Murdoch sits in the Oval Office of the White House as President Donald Trump signs an executive order, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
After the Wall Street Journal reported in July that Donald Trump sent and signed a “bawdy” 50th birthday letter to celebrate infamous sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, the president moved quickly to file a $20 billion defamation lawsuit that called the letter in question both “nonexistent” and a “fake.” On Monday, the House Oversight Committee released photo evidence of the so-called Epstein “birthday book,” which it received from Epstein”s estate in response to a subpoena — and the document dump included the apparent Trump missive, among many other letters, a number of them lewd.
Though the White House has said Trump will “aggressively” continue “litigation,” a leading defamation law expert tells Law&Crime that the development was actually “a stunning blow” for Trump’s claims and an “enormous” boost for WSJ’s defense.
Recall that in mid-July anticipation grew as rumor had it that an explosive WSJ story would shed further light on Trump’s friendship with Epstein, whom he partied with at Mar-a-Lago in the 1990s and praised in 2002 as a “terrific guy” with a noted interest in “beautiful women” on the “younger side” — three years before Epstein was first investigated in Palm Beach for sexually abusing young girls. The WSJ article claimed the “bawdy” letter included a drawing of an outline of a naked woman’s body with “Donald” signed “below her waist” seemingly “mimicking pubic hair,” and a “typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person — with the line “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump threatened to sue the WSJ prior to the publication, then immediately sued the next day in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. In that lawsuit, Trump attorney Alejandro Brito alleged that reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo made it all up and that the proof the letter was “nonexistent” was their inability or refusal to publish the letter itself or explain how they got their hands on it:
Indeed, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo provide a series of quotes from the nonexistent letter, claiming that the letter was written in third person, beginning with a voice over interluding a conversation, followed by a purported dialogue between President Trump and Epstein—as if they were characters in a play.
On the one hand, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely pass off as fact that President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter. And on the other hand, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained. The reason for those failures is because no authentic letter or drawing exists. Defendants concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.
Consider that, also in July, Vice President JD Vance explained that the reason Trump sued is that WSJ published its initial story without a photo of the letter.
“[I]t’s bogus for the WSJ to publish a hit piece without showing us the letter. I have no idea if the book exists—WSJ won’t show it to us. I have no idea if the letter exists—WSJ won’t show it to us. What I find absurd is the idea that Donald Trump was writing poems to Epstein, and I find it equally absurd that a major American paper would attack the President of the United States without revealing the basis for the attack,” Vance said. “We all know what’s going to happen. They’re going to dribble little details out for days or weeks in an effort to assassinate the president’s character. They won’t show us this book or allow us to refute it until they’ve wrung every bit of fake news out of the story. And everyone will just move on from the fact that the WSJ is acting like a Democrat SuperPAC. It’s disgraceful, and it’s why the president sued.”
While the lawsuit has largely gone quiet since, the House Oversight Committee’s document release Monday included a photo of a letter that matches WSJ’s initial report, which renowned First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams tells Law&Crime is an “enormous” boon for WSJ’s defense and “a stunning blow” for Trump.
“The public revelation by the House Oversight Committee of a letter to Jeffrey Epstein apparently written and signed by Donald Trump is an enormous step forward in the Wall Street Journal’s defense of the libel suit filed by Trump and a stunning blow to Trump’s claim,” Abrams, father of Law&Crime founder Dan Abrams, said in an email, noting that the “single missing element in the Journal’s initial — and now fully validated — piece was the absence of the Trump letter itself.”
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“Now we have it and his denials are even less credible than previously,” he said.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt indicated in a statement that, even though the birthday book included letters from Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz and Les Wexner, among others, the Trump letter is fake and the WSJ’s latest reporting including the image is “false” and “FAKE NEWS to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!”
“The latest piece published by the Wall Street Journal PROVES this entire ‘Birthday Card’ story is false. As I have said all along, it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it,” Leavitt said. “President Trump’s legal team will continue to aggressively pursue litigation.”
Law&Crime reached out to Trump attorney Brito to ask if litigation will, indeed, continue, but no response was immediately forthcoming.
The Jeffrey Epstein birthday book letter signed by ‘Donald’ (House Oversight Committee via Epstein’s estate)
Notably, when Trump’s former criminal defense attorney turned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interviewed convicted Epstein accomplice and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell behind bars in July, she said she “never” saw “gentleman” Trump act inappropriately with anyone. At the same time, Maxwell said it was “true” that she put together the Epstein 50th “birthday book” and claimed she did not remember a Trump letter.
“While we’re on this topic, just — and again, I know we’re jumping around and we’ve been going on it for a while, so I apologize,” Blanche said, “But there’s recently been reports about a birthday book that you assembled for Mr. Epstein, I think, for his 50th birthday in 2003.”
“That’s true,” Maxwell replied.
“What do you know about that?” Blanche asked.
Maxwell explained that she got the idea from her mother, who put together a birthday book for Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell’s 60th birthday.
“And when I — Epstein would talk about his 50th, he said, I don’t know what I’m going to do. And I said, well, these are nice things, my mom did this book for my dad. He said, I love that idea. He said, can you help coordinate it? And he organized who — he called a lot of the people himself,” Maxwell said. “I coordinated the putting together of the book. And some — in some instances, I called people that asked them to contribute.”
Maxwell further said that the “ask” of birthday book letter-writers was “say anything you want on a piece of paper.”
As Blanche continued probing about whether Maxwell specifically remembered Trump “submitting a letter or a card or a note,” Maxwell said “I don’t” and that she didn’t have any recollection of a “picture of a naked woman or something like that,” as Blanche put it in his question.
At another point during the interview, Blanche asked about the “birthday book” again and Maxwell again said she didn’t remember asking Trump to submit a letter but suggested it was possible Epstein himself asked Trump to do so.
“I did ask some people. I don’t remember Mr. Trump. I don’t remember who I did ask, but Epstein also asked people himself directly,” Maxwell said. “So it could have happened that way, if it happened at all.”
As of Tuesday, the White House disputed whether that “Donald” signature in the Epstein birthday letter was authentic and signaled its “support” for having a professional handwriting expert review it.
Q: On Epstein, would the White House support a professional handwriting expert review of the document released yesterday to prove it’s not the president’s signature?
LEAVITT: Sure, we would support that. In fact, I’ve already seen many forensic analysts who said this absolutely… pic.twitter.com/ibMcxMgzbL
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 9, 2025
