Melanie Trump, wife of Donald Trump who is the US Republican nominee for president in the upcoming election, has sued the Daily Mail and a US blogger over claims that she was a sex worker.
According to Mrs. Trump’s lawyer, Charles Harder, statements issued about Melanie Trump on Daily Mail on August 20, 2016, in which the newspaper had suggested she had been a sex worker were false and untrue.
“These defendants made several statements about Mrs. Trump that are 100% false and tremendously damaging to her personal and professional reputation,” Harder said.
“Defendants’ actions are so egregious, malicious and harmful to Mrs Trump that her damages are estimated at $150 million.”
Both Daily Mail, and the blogger, have, however, retracted the stories, hours after Melanie Trump issued her statement on Thursday, September 1, 2016.
According to CNN, the suit was filed in a state court in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Mrs. Trump, whose husband is currently vying for the US presidential seat in the elections, is reported to have placed Daily Mail and other news companies on notice three days after the statement which her lawyer calls “defamatory statements”.
Daily Mail had also reported, quoting a Slovenian journalist, Bojan Pozar, author of unauthorized biography, that Melanie Trump posed for nude photos in 1995 and claimed that she had met Mr. Trump later that year, three years before their alleged actual meeting in 1998.
The statement read: “The point of the article was that these allegations could impact the U.S. presidential election even if they are untrue,” the statement continued. “Mrs. Trump’s counsel in the U.S. and the U.K., have stated unequivocally that the allegations about the modeling agencies are false.”
“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,’ that she had a ‘composite or presentation card for the sex business,’ or that either of the modeling agencies referenced in the article were engaged in these businesses, it is hereby retracted, and the Daily Mail newspaper regrets any such misinterpretation.”
The statement also revealed that the story also said she moved to New York in 1995, and not in 1996 as she claims.
Harder told CNN that, despite Daily Mail had retracted the story, Mrs. Trump would go on with the lawsuit.
