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MANHATTAN (CN) — Trump biographer Michael Wolff sued First Lady Melania Trump late Tuesday to stop her from filing a defamation suit over his statements about Melania and Donald Trump’s relationship to convicted pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Wolff, a journalist who has written four books about Donald Trump since he first took office, claims Melania Trump’s lawyers sent a letter threatening to sue him for over $1 billion in damages and demanding he apologize for suggesting online that she is playing a behind-the-scenes role in the Trump administration’s messy handling of the Epstein files.
“It is not defamatory to say that Mrs. Trump is actively managing the present White House response to the controversy. Nor is it defamatory to say that Mrs. Trump was involved in Epstein’s rather expansive social circle,” Wolff wrote.
Wolff argues that the statements Melania Trump claims to be defamatory were taken out of context, and in proper context are protected opinion and hypothesis based on disclosed facts and broader context. He also asserts that Melania Trump cannot prove the required burden of actual malice with clear and convincing evidence that Wolff did not believe his statements to be true.
Wolff filed the 15-page civil defamation suit in New York Supreme Court under the state’s anti-SLAPP law, short for strategic lawsuits against public participation, which is designed to block lawsuits intended to chill speech. He says the libel threat letter is part of a pattern of abusive litigation deployed by the Trumps, “designed to create a climate of fear in the nation so that people cannot freely or confidently exercise their First Amendment rights.”
“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 actions in order to silence their speech, to intimidate their critics generally, and to extract unjustified payments and North Korean style confessions and apologies,” Wolff wrote.
Wolff, who interviewed Epstein extensively before his 2019 jailhouse suicide, notes in the complaint that he intends to use subpoena power in the New York state court proceedings to call witnesses in and probe the Trumps on the record about the particulars of their ties to Epstein.
“To be perfectly honest, I’d like nothing better than to get Donald Trump and Melania Trump under oath in front of a court reporter, and actually find out all of the details of their relationship with Epstein,” Wolff said in a social media post announcing the anti-SLAPP suit from his bucolic beach house in the Hamptons.
Wolff also seeks a declaratory judgment entitling him to legal fees as well as compensatory and punitive damages.
Melania Trump, a Slovenian-American former model, previously settled a defamation suit against the Daily Mail in 2017, reportedly receiving $2.7 million after the tabloid ran a story examining whether she worked as a prostitute before meeting Donald Trump.
In the last year of Donald Trump’s first term, his Justice Department sued Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former adviser to Melania Trump, over her tell-all book “Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady.” Federal prosecutors sought a constructive trust on any profits the author obtained from her book, claiming Wolkoff breached her nondisclosure obligations, but the suit was ultimately dropped by the Biden administration.
President Trump recently targeted the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over an article detailing a ribald letter Trump supposedly sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday. He is seeking $10 billion in that defamation lawsuit.
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