When all else fails, sue. That’s long been Donald Trump’s philosophy. Last year, after he lost re-election by several million votes, he clogged the courts with lawsuits, most (if not all) of them frivolous, most (if not all) of them laughed out of the room. (Meanwhile, he and many of his associates are facing genuine legal peril.) So when he filed lawsuits against his niece (and frequent critic), Mary Trump, as well as The New York Times, all the former could do was laugh.
Donald’s case, as reported by The Daily Beast? It alleges that Mary, who wrote a bestselling takedown of her uncle, was coerced by the paper to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over to The Times.” The findings were made public in the 2018 story that revealed how little he’d paid in federal income taxes, which he’d previously refused to disclose. Mary’s actions, the suit alleges, is in violation of confidentiality agreement she signed in 2001. Trump is seeking “an amount to be determined at trial, but believed to be no less than One Hundred Million Dollars” from both parties.
It’s not the first time Mary Trump has been sued for saying or doing mean things against her uncle. A suit filed on behalf of the former president last year tried to stop her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. That did not work, as per the Beast:
Judge Hal Greenwald ruled in that case that the 2001 confidentiality agreement had been too vaguely defined to stop her from writing about the sitting president and noted that her publisher had not been a signatory to that agreement. Robert Trump died in August 2020.
But Mary doesn’t appear to be worried. “I think he is a f*cking loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can,” Mary told the Beast about her uncle’s new suit. “It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”
In the meantime, guess who’s already in the midst of suing Donald Trump? Mary Trump. Shortly after Too Much and Never Enough was published, she filed a lawsuit against him; his sister, retired federal appeals court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry; as well as the executor of his brother Robert Trump’s estate. She accused them of fraud, claiming they’d stolen millions from her after death of her father, Frederick Trump Jr., in 1981. One guess on which lawsuit will likely hold water.
(Via The Daily Beast)