Murdoch’s Defense in Epstein Lawsuit: Trump Is Lewd

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

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. This 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.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

The staff at Our Land Global Enterprises Inc. yearns for the days when we celebrated the individual birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and could focus on the merits of these imperfect men and their singular contributions to the birth and preservation of this nation. Alas, now all the presidents are smushed together for a more convenient holiday. Moreover, we see how a particular resident of the White House has tarnished the office—which hardly puts us in a celebratory mood. It’s a lot to handle. So I’m giving everybody the day off. (And under the union contract, there’s also not any choice.) We’ll see you in a week.

I’m not really introducing this as a weekly feature. It might be too difficult to find a member of Congress to hail every week, though I know there are many who are mightily striving to do the right thing on a daily basis. But I did want to highlight this exchange from the mud fight that happened on Wednesday when Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and bellowed at Democrats rather than answer their queries. (Forget about the Epstein case, she shouted, and look at the Dow!)

Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) showed how to break through the noise. He played a brief video for Bondi of the January 6 riot that featured a marauder named Jared Wise yelling at police officers, calling them Nazis and shouting, “Kill ’em!” When the footage ended, Neguse said to Bondi, “That man works for you now, right?”

He knew the answer was yes. Last year, the Justice Department hired Wise, who was indicted for civil disorder and aiding and abetting an assault on a law enforcement officer during the 1/6 assault, as a senior adviser for its work on the so-called “weaponization" of law enforcement.

Bondi conceded Wise was employed at her department and added, “I believe he was pardoned.” As if that absolved him of his horrific conduct threatening the Capitol Hill cops during the riot. Neguse replied, “You expect hard-working police officers to believe you take law enforcement seriously?” Without shouting, Neguse showed Bondi and the whole Trump crew to be raging hypocrites. Well done.

There was much hyperventilation on the MAGA right after Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl. To be fair, the show seemed designed to cause a Fox News meltdown. A Latino performing entirely in Spanish and daring to suggest love should unite all the nations of North and South America was quite triggering to the racist snowflakes of Trumpland. The judges began wading through all the idiotic remarks that were prompted by BB’s appearance but came to a halt when they reached Megyn Kelly’s comments. Her remarks on Piers Morgan’s show epitomized the bigotry and cultural small-mindedness of the right.

The judges prefer to keep entries to a few sentences. But in this instance, they decided the entire rant deserved notice:

To get up there and perform the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America. Who gives a damn that we have 40 million Spanish speakers in the United States? We have 310 million who don’t speak a lick of Spanish. This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country. Not for the Latinos. Not for one small group. But for the country. We don’t need a Black national anthem. We don’t need a Spanish-speaking, non-English-performing performer. And we don’t need an ICE or America hater featured as our prime-time entertainment.

After Morgan interrupted to point out there is no official language in the United States, Kelly plowed ahead, comparing Bad Bunny to radical Muslims:

This attitude right there is why you and Great Britain have lost your culture. You have ceded your culture to a bunch of radical Muslims who came in and took over. And now it’s gone. We’re not allowing that here. Whether it’s Hispanic. Whether its Muslim. It’s not happening in the United States of America. It’s why President Trump was elected. And whether it’s Bad Bunny, who is American but refuses to speak English in his performances, or anybody else, we have to keep the Super Bowl, which is a quintessential American event. Football—that kind of football is ours. They call it American football. And the halftime show and everything around it needs to stay quintessentially American. Not Spanish. Not Muslim. Not anything other than good old-fashioned American pie. There should be a meat loaf, maybe some fried chicken, and an English-speaking performer. That’s what the Super Bowl should be.

Football is ours? Talk about white privilege. By the way, about 53 percent of NFL players are Black. If they’re risking CTE so Kelly can watch them, while downing meat loaf, wings, and apple pie, she sure as hell can sit through two minutes and 20 seconds of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Trump pulled a real boner when he was talking to Fox Business about the tariffs he imposed on Switzerland:

So I put on a 30 percent tariff, which is very low...Then I got an emergency call from I believe the prime minister of Switzerland. She was very aggressive...I didn't really like the way she talked to us, so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39 percent.

Trump claims he has the authority to impose tariffs to respond to an economic “emergency.” But that is not what the law says, and the Supreme Court should be ruling on this soon. In any case, does Trump getting his feelings hurt qualify as an economic emergency? This shows how absurd and unconstitutional his tariff crusade is. John Roberts, you paying attention?

Sen. Ron Johnson, a noted conspiracy theorist, ramped up the phony outrage when Minnesota state Attorney General Keith Ellison testified before the Senate. Addressing the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal agents, Johnson exclaimed: "Two people are dead because you encouraged them to put themselves into harm's way! And now you are exploiting those two martyrs...You ought to feel damn guilty about it.”

Johnson was blaming an elected official who supported the right of his state’s citizens to protest instead of the officers who shot and killed Good and Pretti at point-bank range. For this despicable performance, he wins the week.

Yet again we are heartened by a guy in a robe. Federal district court Judge Richard Leon slapped Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth silly, while presiding over the lawsuit filed by Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). Kelly, a retired Air Force officer, is challenging the Pentagon’s decision to censure and punish him for his participation in a video that featured members of Congress reminding service members they don’t have to follow illegal orders. Imposing a temporary injunction on Hegseth, Leon declared, “This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly's First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.”

Boom! But Leon added, “After all, as Bob Dylan famously said, ‘You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’ To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!” An unusual footnote for a legal decision followed: “Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues (Columbia Recs., Mar. 8, 1965).” Leon could have also tossed in this line from Dylan’s “Hurricane”: “Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land / Where justice is a game.”

In a recent issue, I noted that I had been dipping in and out of the Epstein files of millions of pages. That prompted several letters from readers with specific questions, including whether this person or that person is in these records. No need to ask me. You can look it up yourself on this easy-to-use search page. But Margo Landrum wondered:

Any references indicating money laundering partnership between Epstein and Trump?

Not that I've seen so far, and I don’t believe there are any indications they might have collaborated on such an endeavor. I'm not sure either would have trusted the other for that.

In the recent issue on what I called the Soviet-ification of America, I included a quote that’s been attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—which he likely never said: “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.” In response, Brandon Becker wrote:

I appreciated your pseudo-Solzhenitsyn quote about lies. I think there as many good quotes from Orwell. Such as, “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” 

That’s a good one. But there are so many from Orwell. He really saw this current moment coming. It just arrived four decades later than he expected.

Steve Knudsen had a different take on that quote:

We know that Mr. Corn is faithfully reporting the outrages, they know that Mr. Corn is faithfully reporting the outrages, they even know that we know Mr. Corn is faithfully reporting the outrages, we also know that they know we know Mr. Corn is faithfully reporting the outrages, but Mr. Corn is still faithfully reporting the outrages.

Now I am dizzy.

Alyssa Owens sent in a suggestion:

We are actively protesting and promoting boycotts of big businesses that support this regime. Trying to boycott big tech. Perhaps you can help.

Not sure it’s my job to promote a Big Tech boycott. But I wonder how many people would have to boycott a major tech firm—and for how long—for the results to be felt by the company and for the execs to feel compelled to stop sucking up to Trump. Some activists have called for a nationwide general strike. How far can they get with that idea? Unfortunately, to do my job, I'm stuck using some Big Tech. I try to limit my usage of certain platforms. But it's hard in this line of work to escape its clutches.

“Why is everyone calling my bunny ‘bad’?”
“No, Moxie, we’re just talking about Bad Bunny the performer. That’s his name.”
“But a bad bunny doesn’t make any sense.”
“Wait until you hear about Krazy Kat.”
“Now that I get.”