Donald Trump claims that The Wall Street Journal wants to settle his $10 billion lawsuit he filed against the publication and Rupert Murdoch earlier this month over a story on his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump told reporters on Tuesday, “It’s in the lawyer’s hands. I have been treated very fairly by The Wall Street Journal on everything. They even hired people from The Washington Post, third rate reporters, gossip type reporters…I would assume Rupert Murdoch controls it, but maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. And they are talking to us about doing something, but we’ll see what happens. They would like us to drop that. So we’ll see. … They want to settle it.”
A spokesperson for Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, did not immediately return a request for comment.
On Monday, Trump’s legal team filed a motion in Miami federal court seeking an expedited deposition of Murdoch. That’s an unusual request at this early stage, but Trump’s team cited Murdoch’s age, 94, and past reports of health problems. The motion appeared to be a way to put pressure on Murdoch, who was named as a defendant in the lawsuit along with News Corp., its CEO Robert Thompson and the bylined writers on the story.
Earlier this month, the Journal reported on a letter in Trump’s name that was included in an album given to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. The letter, the Journal reported, “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker,” the Journal reported, adding that a “pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”
Trump denied to the Journal that he wrote the letter and threatened to sue. He also has said that he spoke to Murdoch beforehand, and the media mogul told him he would “take care of it.”
A spokesperson for the Journal has said, “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
ABC and CBS have settled lawsuits filed by Trump, even as legal experts have doubted that his claims would survive in court.
