Author Michael Wolff Sues Melania Trump
Melania Trump Sued By Michael Wolff After Claiming She Threatened $1 Billion Lawsuit Over Epstein Remarks
Author Michael Wolff has filed a lawsuit against First Lady Melania Trump, alleging that she threatened to sue him for more than $1 billion in damages unless he retracted recent statements he made linking her to Jeffrey Epstein.
Wolff sought unspecified damages in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, N.Y.
“First Lady Melania Trump is proud to continue standing up to those who spread malicious and defamatory falsehoods as they desperately try to get undeserved attention and money from their unlawful conduct,” Nicholas Clemens, a spokesperson for Melania Trump, said in a statement viewed by the Associated Press.
According to the lawsuit, Wolff claims that Melania and President Donald Trump, “have made a practice of threatening those who speak against them” with costly legal actions “to silence their speech, to intimidate their critics generally, and to extract unjustified payments and North Korean-style confessions and apologies.”
Wolff also claims that the threats “are designed to create a climate of fear in the nation so that people cannot freely or confidently exercise their First Amendment rights.”
The lawsuit also states that threats made by the Trumps are intended to stop inquiries into the couple’s relationship with Epstein, who allegedly killed himself inside of a New York federal jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges.
“The lawsuit came on the day that Melania Trump’s lawyer had set as a deadline for Wolff to retract statements, issue an apology, and pay damages to his client,” AP reports.
And if not, Melania’s lawyer Alejandro Brito, wrote on Oct. 15, “that she would be ‘left with no alternative’ but to sue for over $1 billion after the statements had caused her ‘overwhelming reputational and financial harm.’”
Wolff, the author of several books, including one about the president, hopes that through his lawsuit, he can force the president and Melania under oath to answer questions about Epstein.
The threat of a lawsuit against Wolff followed comments he reportedly made to The Daily Beast and in three social media videos, although Wolff claims some of his statements were clipped or taken out of context.
Wolff claimed that the Trumps were in a “sham marriage, trophy marriage,” which was a “fair and justified” statement of opinion that falls under protected speech, the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit noted that Wolff never said Melania Trump was involved in any of Epstein’s crimes.
While the lawsuit doesn’t claim that Melania participated in any wrongdoing, it does claim that the president’s wife was “very involved” in Epstein’s social circle, where she met Donald Trump, and that the two first had sex on Epstein’s private jet.
And, it added, it was proper to “find out what happened in Mr. Trump’s and Epstein’s 10 years of pursuing models, including supermodels, runway models, catalog models, Eastern European models, and girls who just dreamed of being models,” AP reports.
