The Trump family has been on a lawsuit frenzy against the media since Donald skulked back into the Oval Office, but this time a journalist is biting back.
Michael Wolff filed a lawsuit against Melania Trump after the first lady’s team threatened to sue the writer for $1 billion.
As you might recall, Wolff was the one who first published the claims that Melania met the president by way of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But it’s not as if Wolff pulled these claims out of nowhere.
In November 2024, the journalist—who has a podcast with the Daily Beast—released tape recordings of a conversation with Jeffrey Epstein in which the late convicted sex trafficker referred to Donald as his “closest friend.”
Epstein also strangely brags in the tapes, according to the Daily Beast, that Melania and Donald had sex for the first time while on his private jet.
Author Michael Wolff discusses his latest book on March 14 in New York.
And though Melania has been targeting writers who have hopped on the claims that she met her husband through the disgraced financier, Wolff sees beyond her threats.
In a letter from Melania’s team, she denounces the “false, defamatory, and lewd statements” made by Wolff, calling the claims “extremely salacious.”
But Wolff is hitting back at her legal threat with his own anti-SLAPP lawsuit. New York state has laws protecting journalists from being targeted by powerful people who want to shut down their work, an act called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.
“I’ve written four books about Donald Trump and have never been sued,” he told the Daily Beast.
“Mrs. Trump’s threatened lawsuit is what lawyers call a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, a SLAPP suit. Its purpose was to intimidate and silence me, as Donald Trump has done to so many news organizations and reporters.”
And since those accusations have come to light, Melania has done just that. The seemingly distant first lady—who only seems to pop into the spotlight when it comes to feeding AI to children or promoting her AI book—threatened a book publisher into retracting published work that included the claims.
She also came after Hunter Biden, but former President Joe Biden’s son just scoffed at the empty threats.
Related | Hunter Biden to Melania Trump: Bring it on
Even the Daily Beast took down the original article breaking the news.
Melania is really just taking a page from her husband’s playbook, though. Since the start of his second presidency, Donald has sued and settled with YouTube, Paramount, Meta, and other media giants for various vindictive reasons.
It remains to be seen how this legal battle will pan out, but as Wolff himself said to Axios in regards to the legal threats: "Yeah, what else is new, the Trumps threaten to sue the media?”
