The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has caught President Donald Trump red-handed.
After breaking the story in July about a birthday letter Trump allegedly wrote for disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, the newspaper has published images of the note.
Trump, 79, has vehemently denied writing the letter, which was written in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday book and features a drawing of a naked woman with the scrawled signature Donald mimicking pubic hair.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Journal’s bombshell report in July was met with fury from the president, who swiftly filed a $10 billion lawsuit against Murdoch and the Journal.
“Writing defamatory lies like this shows their desperation to remain relevant,” Trump raged on Truth Social in July. “If there were any truth at all on the Epstein Hoax, as it pertains to President Trump, this information would have been revealed by Comey, Brennan, Crooked Hillary, and other Radical Left Lunatics years ago. It certainly would not have sat in a file waiting for ‘TRUMP’ to have won three Elections. This is yet another example of FAKE NEWS!”
Trump fired off a slew of accusations, writing in one social media post that the Journal “printed a FAKE letter.”
He also claimed he “never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” even though there’s evidence he’s drawn plenty of sketches. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt questioned the credibility of the letter on Monday.
“The latest piece published by the Wall Street Journal PROVES this entire ‘Birthday Card’ story is false,“ she wrote. ”As I have said all along, it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it. President Trump’s legal team will continue to aggressively pursue litigation. Furthermore, the ‘reporter’ who wrote this hatchet job reached out for comment at the EXACT same minute he published his story giving us no time to respond. This is FAKE NEWS to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!"
Trump claimed in his lawsuit that he personally warned Murdoch not to publish the story in July that first mentioned the letter, but Murdoch ignored his demands. In speaking to reporters last month, Trump questioned whether his longtime media frenemy Murdoch had control over the paper.
“I would have assumed that Rupert Murdoch controls it,” Trump said. “Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t.”
The message from Trump to his one-time pal, who died in Manhattan lock-up in 2019, is a fictional dialogue between the two of them that concludes with the line: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Epstein’s estate gave Congress a copy of the letter, which was among those compiled for a book for Epstein’s 50th birthday.
Trump has insisted that he and Epstein were never close friends, repeating several times that he distanced himself from the late financier after he was put on the sex offender list in 2008, shortly after he pleaded guilty to a charge of solicitation of prostitution with a minor.
The president and media mogul Murdoch also have a long and well-documented history.
Long before his presidency, a Trump mention would amount to a spike in sales in Murdoch’s New York Post—which broke its own record for front-page stories on a single topic in the 1990s with its coverage of Trump’s affair with Marla Maples, the New York Times once reported.
Ten years ago, Murdoch initially rejected a Trump bid for the White House. “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Murdoch wrote on Twitter—now X—in 2015, after the then Republican primary candidate mocked John McCain for being captured as a pilot during the Vietnam War.
But Murdoch reportedly went on to become one of Trump’s key advisers before breaking with him again in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
