The British editor who revealed Trump's Epstein letter
It was the US president, dialling in from Air Force One to have a word with the British editor of the Wall Street Journal.
Earlier that day Mr Trump had been announcing an AI investment package in Pittsburgh. Now he was irate, demanding the 'fake' story was pulled and threatening to sue if Ms Tucker did not yield.
His efforts were in vain.
On Thursday night, the newspaper published details of a message said to be signed off with a drawing of a nude woman. Mr Trump had used his signature to represent pubic hair, it is alleged.
The report was certainly salacious; it sparked further questions about Mr Trump's relationship with the paedophile financier.
It helped fan the flames of arguably the biggest crisis of Mr Trump's presidency so far, the growing demand for his administration to release the full so-called Epstein files.
But it also brought Mr Trump into open conflict with one of the world's most powerful media moguls, the Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch.
The call between Ms Tucker and Mr Trump was tense, The Telegraph understands. After the story was published, Mr Trump fired off a lengthy denial on Truth Social, his own media platform.
The 79-year-old accused Ms Tucker of running a 'false, malicious, and defamatory story' and filed a $10bn lawsuit against the WSJ, naming Mr Murdoch and the reporters who wrote the story as defendants.
Holding her nerve has earned Ms Tucker the wrath of the US president and many of his loyal followers. But the Epstein story is the type of reporting Ms Tucker made a name for on Fleet Street – and now the US – those close to her say.
For months, Mr Trump has been angered by the WSJ's coverage of his policies as the newspaper has continued to refuse to shy away from criticising his policies.
While NewsCorp's media outlets, the New York Post and Fox News, often portray the president in a positive light, the WSJ has not attempted to curry favour with the White House.
Media executives such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have appeared to try and appease the US president, but the WSJ has stood out for critical pieces, at times skewering his policies.
In May, when a reporter from the newspaper attempted to ask Mr Trump a question on Air Force One, he denounced the paper as 'rotten' and as having 'truly gone to hell'.
However, the WSJ has maintained its influence. Last month, JD Vance, the vice-president, travelled to Mr Murdoch's Montana ranch to speak to the media mogul, his son Lachlan and other Fox News executives.
Ms Tucker, 58, was selected by Mr Murdoch as the newspaper's first female editor-in-chief, replacing Matt Murray in February 2023 in a bid to shake up the publication.
Born in London in 1966, she grew up in Lewes, Sussex, before going to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University College, Oxford, where she edited the university magazine Isis.
After joining the graduate trainee programme at the Financial Times, where she met her close friend Rachel Johnson, Boris Johnson's sister, she went on to work in the newspaper's Berlin and Brussels bureaus.
In 2020, she became the first female editor of The Sunday Times in more than a century. Ex-colleagues describe her as tenacious.
Asked about the run-in with Mr Trump, John Witherow, the former editor of The Times, told The Telegraph of his former deputy: 'I know she's tough.'
Within weeks of arriving at the WSJ, Ms Tucker demonstrated her determination to back her reporters in the campaign to release WSJ journalist Evan Gershkovich, who had been detained in Russia.
But while she received praise for her campaign for Mr Gershkovich's release, her arrival was not welcomed by everyone. Many staff were abhorred by job cuts, restructuring and a push to digital-first to attempt to bring an edginess back to the publication.
Last year, more than 100 journalists staged a protest against the changes, covering the walls of her office in Post-it notes with comments such as 'the cuts are killing morale'.
Ms Tucker told Vanity Fair that while the cuts 'may look callous, it's so that we get it right, so I don't have to do it over again.'
She has also come under fire for coverage from both sides of the political aisle. The WSJ was the first newspaper to report on Joe Biden's mental fitness, journalism that was denounced by some left-leaning publications at the time.
She also clashed with Mr Murdoch, with reports suggesting he was 'livid' with her after the WSJ described a newsletter launched by a former CNN reporter as a 'must-read'.
Ms Tucker has also been outspoken about standing up to the Trump administration. Responding to claims by the CEO of Elon Musk's X that her newspaper had run a fake news story about the platform, she said: 'Many of the stories we publish do upset political leaders or CEOs, but we can't, you know, we have to be thinking about the validity of the story.'
Ms Tucker will now likely face Mr Trump in court in some form as her paper defends the $10bn lawsuit. Whether full details of the alleged birthday card will come to light is not yet clear.
Unlike the two reporters who brought her the story, and Mr Murdoch she is not named in Mr Trump's legal action.
Since parts of the letter were published on Thursday, the Trump administration has already promised to release more transcripts from the investigations into Epstein.
But the scandal shows little sign of going away.
The release of the grand jury documents may fall short of what many of Mr Trump's supporters have sought.
On Sunday, one of Epstein's former attorneys called on the US Justice Department to release additional investigative records from its sex-trafficking investigation, and urged the government to grant Ghislaine Maxwell – Epstein's former girlfriend and former British socialite – immunity so that she can testify about his crimes.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Alan Dershowitz said the grand jury transcripts that Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday asked a federal judge to unseal would not contain the types of information being sought by Mr Trump's supporters, such as the names of Epstein's clientele.
'I think the judge should release it, but they are not in the grand jury transcripts,' Dershowitz said on the programme. 'I've seen some of these materials. For example, there is an FBI report of interviews with alleged victims in which at least one of the victims names very important people,' he said, adding that those names have been redacted.
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FACT FOCUS: Trump claims cashless bail increases crime, but data is inconclusive
As his administration faces mounting pressure to release Justice Department files related the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, President Donald Trump is highlighting a different criminal justice issue — cashless bail. He suggested in a Truth Social post this week that eliminating cash bail as a condition of pretrial release from jail has led to rising crime in U.S. cities that have enacted these reforms. However, studies have shown no clear link. Here's a closer look at the facts. TRUMP: 'Crime in American Cities started to significantly rise when they went to CASHLESS BAIL. The WORST criminals are flooding our streets and endangering even our great law enforcement officers. It is a complete disaster, and must be ended, IMMEDIATELY!' THE FACTS: Data has not determined the impact of cashless bail on crime rates. But experts say it is incorrect to claim that there is an adverse connection. 'I don't know of any valid studies corroborating the President's claim and would love to know what the Administration offers in support,' said Kellen Funk, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies pretrial procedure and bail bonding. 'In my professional judgment I'd call the claim demonstrably false and inflammatory.' Jeff Clayton, executive director of the American Bail Coalition, the main lobbying arm of the cash bail industry, also pointed to a lack of evidence. 'Studies are inconclusive in terms of whether bail reforms have had an impact on overall crime numbers,' he said. 'This is due to pretrial crime being a small subset of overall crime. It is also difficult to categorize reforms as being 'cashless' or not, i.e., policies where preventative detention is introduced as an alternative to being held on bail.' Different jurisdictions, different laws In 2023, Illinois became the first state to completely eliminate cash bail when the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law abolishing it. The move was part of an expansive criminal justice overhaul adopted in 2021 known as the SAFE-T Act. Under the change, a judge decides whether to release the defendant prior to their trial, weighing factors such as their criminal charges, if they could pose any danger to others and if they are considered a flight risk. Loyola University of Chicago's Center for Criminal Justice published a 2024 report on Illinois' new cashless bail policy, one year after it went into effect. It acknowledges that there is not yet enough data to know what impact the law has had on crime, but that crime in Illinois did not increase after its implementation. Violent and property crime declined in some counties. A number of other jurisdictions, including New Jersey, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., have nearly eliminated cash bail or limited its use. Many include exceptions for high-level crimes. Proponents of eliminating cash bail describe it as a penalty on poverty, suggesting that the wealthy can pay their way out of jail to await trial while those with fewer financial resources have to sit it out behind bars. Critics have argued that bail is a time-honored way to ensure defendants released from jail show up for court proceedings. They warn that violent criminals will be released pending trial, giving them license to commit other crimes. A lack of consensus Studies have shown mixed results regarding the impact of cashless bail on crime. Many focus on the recidivism of individual defendants rather than overall crime rates. A 2024 report published by the Brennan Center for Justice saw 'no statistically significant relationship' between bail reform and crime rates. It looked at crime rate data from 2015 through 2021 for 33 cities across the U.S., 22 of which had instituted some type of bail reform. Researchers used a statistical method to determine if crime rates had diverged in those with reforms and those without. Ames Grawert, the report's co-author and senior counsel in the Brennan Center's Justice Program, said this conclusion "holds true for trends in crime overall or specifically violent crime.' Similarly, a 2023 paper published in the American Economic Journal found no evidence that cash bail helps ensure defendants will show up in court or prevents crime among those who are released while awaiting trial. The paper evaluated the impact of a 2018 policy instituted by the Philadelphia's district attorney that instructed prosecutors not to set bail for certain offenses. A 2019 court decree in Harris County, Texas, requires most people charged with a misdemeanor to be released without bail while awaiting trial. The latest report from the monitoring team responsible for tracking the impact of this decision, released in 2024, notes that the number of people arrested for misdemeanors has declined by more than 15% since 2015. The number of those rearrested within one year has similarly declined, with rearrest rates remaining stable in recent years. Asked what data Trump was using to support his claim, the White House pointed to a 2022 report from the district attorney's office in Yolo County, California, that looked at how a temporary cashless bail system implemented across the state to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in courts and jails impacted recidivism. It found that out of 595 individuals released between April 2020 and May 2021 under this system, 70.6% were arrested again after they were released. A little more than half were rearrested more than once. A more recent paper, published in February by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, also explored the effects of California's decision to suspend most bail during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports that implementation of this policy 'caused notable increases in both the likelihood and number of rearrests within 30 days.' However, a return to cash bail did not impact the number of rearrests for any type of offense. The paper acknowledges that other factors, such as societal disruption from the pandemic, could have contributed to the initial increase. Many contributing factors It is difficult to pinpoint specific explanations for why crime rises and falls. The American Bail Coalition's Clayton noted that other policies that have had a negative impact on crime, implemented concurrently with bail reforms, make it 'difficult to isolate or elevate one or more causes over the others.' Paul Heaton, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies criminal justice interventions, had a similar outlook. 'Certainly there are some policy levers that people look at — the size of the police force and certain policies around sentencing,' he said. 'But there's a lot of variation in crime that I think even criminologists don't necessarily fully understand.' ___ Find AP Fact Checks here:
