WSJ 'smells blood in the water' as Trump risks alienating Rupert Murdoch: report

28 Jul 2025, 12:51 by https://www.facebook.com/17108852506 · AlterNet

Fox News' Rupert Murdoch receiving the Global Leadership Award 2015 on November 30, 2015 (Hudson Institute/Wikimedia Commons)

Alex Henderson
July 28, 2025 | 08:51AM ETBank

President Donald Trump has filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal in response to an article reporting that he sent a "bawdy" letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.

The article never accused Trump of being involved in any of Epstein's sex crimes, and many legal experts consider the lawsuit frivolous and devoid of merit — including MSNBC's Lisa Rubin and law professor/former U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor Kimberly Wehle. But during a July 20 appearance on MSNBC, Michael Cohen, Trump's formerly personal attorney and fixer, predicted that the WSJ and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, will cave in and agree to pay a settlement regardless of how flawed Trump's lawsuit is.

The Guardian's Ben Makuch, meanwhile, views the WSJ/Murdoch lawsuit as an example of Trump cutting his nose to spite his face — as Murdoch also owns Fox News and Fox Business, which have been extremely pro-Trump during his second presidency.

"In the wake of new revelations regarding the friendship of Donald Trump and disgraced and deceased billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein," Makuch explains in an article published on July 28, "Rupert Murdoch's media empire has both poured gasoline onto the story and come to Trump's loyal defense. Experts say that, much like the broader MAGA movement, the Epstein affair is testing Trump and Murdoch's mostly chummy relationship…. There is trouble in paradise. Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) broke the story that Trump allegedly penned a seedy birthday message to Epstein in 2003."

Makuch adds, "The president then did what he does best: filed a libel suit for billions in damages."

The Guardian reporter stresses that Trump's lawsuit hasn't made Fox News any less pro-Trump.

"While the WSJ, a more independent and centrist publication in comparison with the rest of Murdoch's media empire, cast a stone against the president," Makuch observes, "Fox News is more than making up for it. Perhaps, that is, to avoid the fates of Paramount and ABC, which paid off Trump in large sums to settle suits that ultimately involved freedom of the press issues. Both networks stood to beat Trump on the facts of the cases, but avoided more litigation in what many have seen as a veritable bribe to a suit-happy and powerful president."

Makuch notes that Edward Ongweso Jr., a senior researcher at Security in Context, "believes WSJ reporters might smell blood in the water for the president and report on him accordingly.

Ongweso told The Guardian, "There has been a trickle of additional Epstein-Trump material, most recently the resurfacing of photos showing Epstein at Trump's 1993 wedding to Martha Maples. There is certainly more that WSJ reporters will uncover and unless there's editorial interference, I can't see how Murdoch's empire can stop itself from uttering his name again."

Read Ben Makuch's full article for The Guardian at this link.