Journalist and author Michael Wolff has filed a lawsuit against First Lady Melania Trump, accusing her of shutting down questions relating to her and Jeffrey Epstein.
Melania’s attorneys threatened Wolff with legal action amounting to over $1 billion in damages if he did not apologize and retract previous statements he made attempting to tie the first lady to the late sex offender, according to the lawsuit.
Wolff, the biographer who has written extensively about President Donald Trump, had until Tuesday October 21 to comply with the first lady’s demands, but instead hit back with his own suit, TMZ first reported.
“Mrs. Trump and her “unitary executive” husband along with their MAGA myrmidons have made a practice of threatening those who speak against them with costly SLAPP 1 actions in order to silence their speech, to intimidate their critics generally, and to extract unjustified payments and North Korean style confessions and apologies,” the court filing stated.
Wolff’s lawyers argued that the first lady’s legal threats were “designed to create a climate of fear” so that people cannot exercise their First Amendment rights.
“The threats are also intended to shut down legitimate inquiry into the Epstein matter which the Trumps and their collaborators have at every turn sought to impede and suppress,” the filing said.
The legal action comes ahead of Wolff’s anticipated tell-all book that could include details about the Trumps’ ties to Epstein.
Wolff has been accused of making “defamatory, disparaging, misleading, and inflammatory” statements about Melania, which his legal team disputed in the complaint.
They argued that Wolff is a journalist “who has done his job diligently.”
A spokesman for the Office of the First Lady told The Independent: “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.”
Wolff’s legal action comes after Hunter Biden refused to apologize to the first lady in August. Former President Joe Biden’s son was threatened with legal action for “over $1bn in damages” if he failed to retract comments he made linking her to Epstein.
“First of all is that, what I said was what I have heard and seen reported and written, primarily from Michael Wolff but also dating back all the way to 2019 when The New York Times – I think Annie Karni and and Maggie Haberman – reported that sources said that Jeffrey Epstein claimed to be the person to introduce Donald Trump to Melania at that time,” Biden said in a YouTube interview he gave to British journalist Andrew Callaghan earlier this year.
Biden alleged that it was Epstein who first introduced Melania to Trump in the late 1990s, when she was a fashion model and he a luxury property magnate with no known political aspirations.
The statements are false, defamatory, and “extremely salacious,” Melania’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, wrote in the letter to Biden.
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