Over the last year and change, Donald Trump and his various close associates have made a crude artform of “the lawsuit as an intimidation tool,” launching legal cases with massively inflated price tags attached, not because they expected CBS News or ABC or any of their other targets to take these often-frivolous cases to court, but to impress upon them how bad things could go if they did. Now, though, the Trump family finds itself facing a bit of its own medicine, as the Associated Press reports that author Michael Wolff has launched his own suit against First Lady Melania Trump, basically pulling an “I sued you first.”
Wolff—who took on an extra dose of national prominence with his 2018 bestseller Fire And Fury, which painted a highly dysfunctional portrait of the early days of the first Trump administration—launched his suit in response to a purported billion-dollar threat from Melania Trump, over statements Wolff is alleged to have made about her connections to Jeffrey Epstein. (Wolff has claimed to have conducted more than 100 hours of interviews with Epstein before his completely unsuspicious death in prison in August of 2019.) Among other things, Wolff has claimed that Melania Trump was “very involved” in Epstein’s social circle, and that she first had sex with her future husband on Epstein’s infamous jet. Trump’s lawyers claimed that Wolff’s statements caused her “overwhelming reputational and financial harm,” and set a deadline this week for him to recant them, lest he get hit with a billion-dollar legal ruling.
Instead, Wolff countered with his own suit, saying that the Trumps “have made a practice of threatening those who speak against them” with costly legal actions “to silence their speech, to intimidate their critics generally, and to extract unjustified payments and North Korean style confessions and apologies.” (The lawsuit also calls Trump’s advocates “MAGA myrmidons,” which is the kind of legal name-calling you only get from a New York Times-bestselling plaintiff.) Basically, Wolff’s response has been to say “bring it on,” saying in a press statement that, “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.” Which might wind up being pretty interesting, generally: All of the Trump family’s recent suits have notably collapsed into settlements before the legal process of discovery could take place, so having one actually get closer to trial might kick up god-knows-what.
