On Tuesday afternoon, as her newspaper prepared to publish details of a bawdy birthday card Donald Trump allegedly wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, Emma Tucker’s phone rang.
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 Wall Street Journal’s story has brought Mr Trump into open conflict with the newspaper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch – Reuters/Carlo Allegri
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.
As seen by the Trump-Epstein birthday card story, the WSJ has not attempted to keep on the right side of the White House – Getty Images
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.
Many of Mr Trump’s own supporters want to see a full release of the Epstein files – AFP/Alex Wroblewski
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.
