Melania Trump files $150m lawsuit against UK Daily Mail and blogger over reports that she was an 'escort' in the 90s
Melania Trump, former
model and the wife of US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, sued
the US-based publisher of the Daily Mail Online and a blogger over stories
making false and defamatory statements about her supposedly being an escort in
the 1990s.
The Daily Mail story
last month cited a Slovenian magazine’s report that a modeling agency that
Trump worked with in New York in the 1990s also served as an escort business,
linking wealthy clients with women for sexual services.
On Thursday September
1st, The Daily Mail retracted the story in a post on its website:
"To the extent that anything in the Daily
Mail’s article was interpreted as stating or suggesting that Mrs. Trump worked
as an ‘escort’ or in the ‘sex business’… is hereby retracted, and the Daily
Mail newspaper regrets any such misinterpretation"
Trump had notified the
British newspaper and other news organizations on August 22 that she would take
legal action, Trump’s attorney, Charles Harder, said in an email at the time,
calling the reports "outright lying."
"These defendants made several statements
about Mrs. Trump that are 100 percent false and tremendously damaging to her
personal and professional reputation," he said in a statement on
Thursday.
The lawsuit filed in
state circuit court in Montgomery County, Maryland, alleges that the Maryland
blogger, Webster Griffin Tarpley, published "false and defamatory
statements" about Trump, including that the former model had suffered from
“a full-blown nervous breakdown."
"Defendants’ actions are so egregious,
malicious and harmful to Mrs. Trump that her damages are estimated at 150
million dollars," her lawyer’s statement said
Tarpley said in a
statement that the lawsuit is without merit.
"We are confident that Mrs. Trump will not
be able to meet her high burden of proving the statements published about her
on my website were defamatory in any way," he said.
Source: Daily Mail/Reuters
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