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By Aziz Huq July 23, 20253:23 PM

Epstein, the WSJ headline: "Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump. The leather-bound book was compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell. The president says the letter ‘is a fake thing.’"; Trump. This could be costly for Trump. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images and Florida Department of Law Enforcement via Getty Images.

When Donald Trump sued the Wall Street Journal last week for libel after the paper published an article about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, he was likely anticipating a rerun of his suit against CBS: bellicose threats followed by a Trump-friendly settlement, perhaps with a side order of censorship. Why else demand $10 billion in damages—an amount roughly the GDP of Togo?

But the Journal suit is potentially a different beast from the CBS suit. Not only does the president face significant barriers to any actual win on the merits of the case, at least under current law; the legal process may prove politically costly because the mechanics of ordinary civil litigation will likely imperil Trump’s ability to control the narrative of the Epstein affair.

To begin with, an obvious reason the suits differ is that Trump relied on different laws to bring them. Although the CBS suit was filed under a Texas state law concerning deceptive business practices, the Journal suit relies on libel. Trump claims specifically not to be the author of a letter and a lewd drawing that, according to the Journal, he put together for Epstein’s 50th birthday. The truth of the matter has not yet been litigated.

Despite some complaints by conservative Supreme Court justices, it remains well established that libel plaintiffs must show that a defendant acted with “actual malice.” Unless the Journal knew that its story was false, or proceeded with reckless disregard to its falsity, it’s not liable. If the Journal’s reporting is accurate, for example, that would also foreclose any liability.

Perhaps the president is anticipating that SCOTUS will revisit libel law and extend his extraordinary series of wins there. But even these justices may be reluctant to return to a legal regime that was notoriously used to defend Jim Crow—before the landmark Sullivan case announced the “actual malice” rule, Southern segregationists wielded libel to shut down debate about their racist segregation. Would even the Roberts court drive us back to those days?

As important as actual malice, but less appreciated, is the fact that a libel case is an ordinary civil case. So if Trump overcomes the Journal’s motion to dismiss and the paper declines to settle, he faces the discovery process—a pretrial phase in which parties get to demand evidence from each other. Of course, Trump may be banking on the Murdoch family’s News Corp, the Journal’s parent company, settling under pressure from its own Republican-aligned leadership and allies.

Crucially, discovery in a libel action is bilateral. The plaintiff and defendant get to make demands for information and documents from the other side. As the nation’s leading expert on libel (and former counsel for Dow Jones) Robert Sack has explained, defendants often use discovery to “establish the truth of some portions of the article and thereby remove them from contention.” (Full disclosure: Twenty-three years ago, I worked as a law clerk for Sack, who became a federal judge.)

Carefully reading the complaint, the Journal’s lawyer must already realize that this provides an extraordinary range of inquiry.

Obviously, many of the factual questions at issue in the libel suit concern the letter from Trump to Epstein purportedly sent for the latter’s 50th birthday. The Journal can seek information related to Trump’s authorship of that note, including a deposition in which the president may be required to testify under oath. And it can seek any and all documentary information about Trump’s relationship with Epstein around that time—again, under threat of penalty.

Trump’s complaint, however, opens the gate for discovery even wider: It calls “unsubstantiated” and “false” the assertion that the president has been a “friend,” a “pal,” or “family” of Epstein. In effect, the complaint here invites the Journal’s lawyer to use interrogatories and depositions to plumb the entire relationship between the two men. Indeed, it positively drives those attorneys, simply as a matter of zealous advocacy, to assume a robust and admissible record of the entire arc of the Trump-Epstein relationship

Consider the risks to Trump at this point: Other presidents have been, shall we say, less than judicious with the truth while speaking under oath in civil depositions. Things didn’t turn out well. Although impeachment seems unlikely in this case, a well-publicized instance of perjury by the president can hardly be seen as a political winner—at least in relation to Epstein.

Nor can Trump use his office as a shield or a stick, at least under present law. The Supreme Court has previously rejected efforts to protect the president from civil suits based on private conduct, even while the president is in office. In that case, a suit filed by Paula Jones against Bill Clinton, the majority warned that it might be appropriate to delay litigation to avoid burdening the defendant, the incumbent president. But here, where the president has initiated the suit while in office with the apparent intent of vigorously prosecuting it, he can hardly be heard to complain and seek delay.

Moreover, even though the Roberts court has established (a dangerous) criminal immunity for presidents when they act in their official role, the same justices have twice permitted evidentiary demands to be made of presidents in their unofficial capacity.

In two cases decided the same day in July 2020, SCOTUS allowed evidentiary requests by legislators and a state prosecutor to proceed against the then sitting president (Trump, as it happened). Although the court warned district courts to proceed with delicacy, it offered presidents no conclusive shield from discovery in their nonofficial roles.

True, those cases involved legislative or criminal inquiry. It’s not guaranteed that they would extend to the civil context. And I suspect that the Roberts court would be reluctant to extend them to a case in which the president was a defendant. But recall, again, that this case was not brought against Trump. He’s seeking to extract by force of law $10 billion from the Journal and its reporters. To embrace that outcome while denying defendants the chance to make their case flies in the face of due process in ways conservatives and liberals alike have historically resisted.

It isn’t hard to imagine that the lawyers for the president in his suit against the Journal did not have the time to air all these possible, even probable, downstream consequences to Trump—especially given the speed with which the suit was filed. It is also likely that the president would have been little inclined to listen to tedious lawyerly cautions. As any attorney will tell you, clients often ignore these concerns.

But incaution in this case may well have consequences, not just for the Journal but for how long the Epstein saga runs—and whether it goes on to drag down the Trump presidency in the coming months.

Matter and antimatter are like mirror opposites: they are the same in every respect except for their electric charge. Well, almost the same—very occasionally, matter and antimatter behave differently from each other, and when they do, physicists get very excited. Now scientists at the world’s largest particle collider have observed a new class of antimatter particles breaking down at a different rate than their matter counterparts. The discovery is a significant step in physicists’ quest to solve one of the biggest mysteries in the universe: why there is something rather than nothing.

The world around us is made of matter—the stars, planets, people and things that populate our cosmos are composed of atoms that contain only matter, and no antimatter. But it didn’t have to be this way. Our best theories suggest that when the universe was born it had equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and when the two made contact, they annihilated one another. For some reason, a small excess of matter survived and went on to create the physical world. Why? No one knows.

So physicists have been on the hunt for any sign of difference between matter and antimatter, known in the field as a violation of “charge conjugation–parity symmetry,” or CP violation, that could explain why some matter escaped destruction in the early universe.

Today physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s LHCb experiment published a paper in the journal Nature announcing that they’ve measured CP violation for the first time in baryons—the class of particles that includes the protons and neutrons inside atoms. Baryons are all built from triplets of even smaller particles called quarks. Previous experiments dating back to 1964 had seen CP violation in meson particles, which unlike baryons are made of a quark-antiquark pair. In the new experiment, scientists observed that baryons made of an up quark, a down quark and one of their more exotic cousins called a beauty quark decay more often than baryons made of the antimatter versions of those same three quarks. Workers at CERN stare upwards at the comparatively large LHCb particle detector magnet

Magnet for the LHCb (large hadron collider beauty) particle detector at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory) near Geneva, Switzerland.

CERN/Science Source

“This is a milestone in the search for CP violation,” says Xueting Yang of Peking University, a member of the LHCb team that analyzed the data behind the measurement. “Since baryons are the building blocks of the everyday things around us, the first observation of CP violation in baryons opens a new window for us to search for hints of new physics.”

The LHCb experiment is the only machine in the world that can summon sufficient energies to make baryons containing beauty quarks. It does this by accelerating protons to nearly the speed of light, then smashing them together in about 200 million collisions every second. As the protons dissolve, the energy of the crash springs new particles into being.

“It is an amazing measurement,” says theoretical physicist Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study, who was not involved in the experiment. "Baryons containing b [beauty] quarks are relatively hard to produce, and CP violation is very delicate and hard to study.”

The 69-foot-long, 6,000-ton LHCb experiment can track all the particles created during the collisions and the many different ways they can break down into smaller particles. “The detector is like a gigantic four-dimensional camera that is able to record the passage of all the particles through it,” says LHCb spokesperson and study co-author Vincenzo Vagnoni of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). “With all this information, we can reconstruct precisely what happened in the initial collision and everything that came out and then decayed.”

The matter-antimatter difference scientists observed in this case is relatively small, and it fits within predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics—the reigning theory of the subatomic realm. This puny amount of CP violation, however, cannot account for the profound asymmetry between matter and antimatter we see throughout space.

“The measurement itself is a great achievement, but the result, to me, is not surprising,” says Jessica Turner, a theoretical physicist at Durham University in England, who was not involved in the research. “The observed CP violation seems to be in line with what has been measured before in the quark sector, and we know that is not enough to produce the observed baryon asymmetry.”

To understand how matter got the upper hand in the early universe, physicists must find new ways that matter and antimatter diverge, most likely via particles that have yet to be seen. “There should be a new class of particles that were present in the early universe, which exhibit a much larger amount of this behavior,” Vagnoni says. “We are trying to find little discrepancies between what we observe and what is predicted by the Standard Model. If we find a discrepancy, then we can pinpoint what is wrong.”

The researchers hope to discover more cracks in the Standard Model as the experiment keeps running. Eventually LHCb should collect about 30 times more data than was used for this analysis, which will allow physicists to search for CP violation in particle decays that are even rarer than the one observed here. So stay tuned for an answer to why anything exists at all.

Whether you are pitching a market expansion, proposing a strategic acquisition, or advocating for a major technology investment, you often face objections. The stakeholders might say the timing is wrong, the risk is too high, or the resources should be allocated elsewhere. Whenever you must bring someone over to your point of view, you are likely to get pushback and objections. Learning to deal with objections is a key negotiation skill and one that every business owner or executive must master.

While objections might raise different concerns, they generally take one of three forms:

“Yes, but…,” such as “Yes, but we already have a strategy that works fine.” 
“What if… ?” as in “What if we adopt this strategy and it doesn’t work?”  
“Why should we… ?” For example, “Why should we make this change now, just as people are recovering from recent layoffs?” “Why should we restructure our leadership reporting now, just as we’re stabilizing after the recent acquisition?” 

To bring your reader or listener over to your side, you must be prepared to deal with these objections—and any others that come your way.
Put yourself in the other person’s position

Imagine you were opposing your own proposal. What objections would you have? Consider what you know about your audience: What are their likely concerns? What are their questions? What form are their objections likely to take? The following responses that can help.

1. Acknowledge the person’s objection

You might say, “I hear that you’re concerned about the regulatory requirements of this proposal and how this might affect our relationship with investors.” Then, restate the objection to be sure you truly grasp their meaning.

You could say, “Let me be sure I understand. You’re saying that moving forward with this proposal could trigger regulatory scrutiny that might complicate our other priorities and potentially concern our key investors. Is that correct?” or “If I understand you, you’re worried this could create compliance risks that outweigh the strategic benefits. Did I get that right?”

If the prospect says no, ask for clarification before moving on. This step reassures the other person that you are genuinely listening and that you respect their perspective.

2. Respond to the objections thoughtfully

Respond effectively by demonstrating the benefits of your proposal and describing the costs of not acting. For example, in the board of directors’ case, you could point out that your current strategy does not consider the impact of artificial intelligence on your operations, while the proposed strategy seamlessly integrates AI into the organization. You might also point out that other organizations have successfully implemented similar strategies.

Your description of costs and benefits should focus more on the value of your proposal than the cost. When you clearly convey value, cost becomes less significant.

3. Collaborate to find a solution that feels manageable and worthwhile for everyone

Rather than pushing your position, invite others to share their ideas for addressing the issue. Work together toward an approach that satisfies both sides.

For example, you might establish a phased implementation with designated oversight checkpoints or form a steering committee to oversee the rollout. You could provide data-backed risk assessments, detail contingency plans, and show how the proposal aligns with long-term vision and goals.

For organizational changes, you can offer to hold company-wide meetings where you explain how the prospective change aligns with the company vision, enabling everyone to voice their concerns. Whatever solution you arrive at should feel like a win-win. You should feel heard, and the other party should become an active collaborator in solving the problem.

When you follow these three steps—acknowledge, respond, and collaborate—you will find it easier to respond empathetically and confidently to even the thorniest objections, especially in times when resources are tight, and decisions carry more weight. Please try this method and let me know how it works for you. You can reach me at lizd@worktalk.com if you’d like to share any examples or have questions.