Author Michael Wolff claims in a lawsuit that First Lady Melania Trump threatened to sue him for over $1 billion in damages if he didn’t retract Jeffrey Epstein -related statements he recently made about her.
Wolff sought unspecified damages in the lawsuit filed Tuesday in state Supreme Court in Manhattan.
Nicholas Clemens, a spokesperson for Melania Trump, issued a statement, saying: “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.”
In his lawsuit, Wolff said Melania Trump and her husband, 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.”
He said 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.”
According to the lawsuit, the threats are also meant to shut down inquiry into the couple’s involvement with Epstein, the notorious financier who killed himself in a New York federal jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on 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.
The 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.”
Through his lawsuit, Wolff announced his intention to use the legal action to put the president and his wife under oath to answer questions about Epstein. Wolff has published a dozen books, including four bestsellers about the president.
Wolff said in the lawsuit that Melania Trump’s threat to sue came over statements he made to “The Daily Beast” and in three videos published on social media, although he added that some statements were incomplete phrases and were taken out of context.
Others, the lawsuit said, were protected speech. For instance, the statement that the Trumps were in a “sham marriage, trophy marriage,” was a “fair and justified” statement of opinion, it said.
The lawsuit noted that Wolff never said Melania Trump was involved in any of Epstein’s crimes.
Among the statements the lawsuit said were true were those saying Melania Trump was “very involved” in Epstein’s social circle, where she met her future husband, and that Donald Trump liked to have sex with his friend’s wives and first slept with Melania Trump on Epstein’s private jet.
The lawsuit said it was fair to question how Melania Trump fits into the Epstein story.
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.”
According to the lawsuit, that subject “will be one of the zones of inquiry that this lawsuit will have to undertake.”
Wolff conducted interviews with Epstein before his death.
Earlier this year, President Trump berated Wolff as a “Third Rate Reporter” and, in one lengthy social media post, called his upcoming book “a total FAKE JOB, just like the other JUNK he wrote.”
Trump added: “His other books about me have been discredited, as this one will be also.”
Associated Press Writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.
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