Melania Trump Seeks Sanctions Against Journalist in Latest Court Filing
The first lady wants Michael Wolff to pay a ‘reasonable’ amount of her court fees after a federal judge dismissed his anti-SLAPP lawsuit against her.
New legal action taken by Melania Trump against journalist and Donald Trump biographer Michael Wolff this week seeks reimbursement for her legal costs on the heels of a federal judge dismissing his anti-SLAPP lawsuit against the first lady.
On Tuesday, Mrs. Trump filed a motion for sanctions against Wolff despite Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil’s suggestion after she dismissed Wolff’s lawsuit that the two parties move on.
“I wonder if it’s in the best interest of the parties to continue litigating in this court,” Vyskocil said last month.
Attorneys representing the first lady pressed on in a 26-page filing asking that Mrs. Trump “be awarded her costs and reasonable attorney’s fees” after accusing Wolff of turning a “serious, looming defamation suit” that she threatened against Wolff into “a fundraising drive and political spectacle.”
Mrs. Trump and her attorneys in the filing said Wolff and his counsel “asserted a legally frivolous claim, propped it up with factual contentions that lacked any evidentiary support, and used them to run a political and commercial campaign. They should pay for Mrs. Trump’s fees and expenses incurred for the process they abused.”
Wolff, in a social media post earlier this week responded by calling Mrs. Trump’s argument a “perverse inversion.”
“I would not have had to raise money if they had not threatened to sue me for a billion dollars,” Wolff said. “The entire purpose of this lawsuit is to affirm my right and everybody’s right to say anything we want about people in the White House. In other words, this is a vivid example of Trump law.”
SLAPP, short for strategic lawsuits against public participation, have become a common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism through expensive, baseless legal proceedings, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Anti-SLAPP laws are intended to prevent people from using courts, and potential threats of a lawsuit, to intimidate people who are exercising their First Amendment rights. Anti-SLAPP statutes can protect individual journalists from the financial threat of groundless defamation cases.
Wolff set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for his legal fees to fight Mrs. Trump. To date, he has raised $840,000. Wolff on the crowdfunding platform also said his goal is to use the subpoena power of a lawsuit to “make every effort to force husband and wife, under oath, to testify about their relationship with Epstein, or to hold them to account for why they won’t.”
Last October, Wolff sued Mrs. Trump after he claimed the first lady sent him a letter threatening to sue him for $1 billion and demanded he apologize for statements made about Melania and Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019 while in custody after being indicted for sex trafficking minors.
Wolff’s lawsuit against Mrs. Trump was filed to preemptively stop her from filing a defamation lawsuit against him. The judge dismissed Wolff’s lawsuit on May 22 saying, “That is not how the federal courts work.” The judge also criticized him for an “inappropriate level of tactical gamesmanship.”
In April, Mrs. Trump made an extraordinary statement from the White House denying links to Jeffrey Epstein and demanded that lies tying her to Epstein stop. She also urged Congress to hold a public hearing for survivors of Epstein’s crimes.
It has since not been completely clear what prompted Mrs. Trump to speak out at the time about Epstein, who had ties to elites around the world. But in her remarks she said, “Numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been circulating on social media for years now. Be cautious what you believe. These images and stories are completely false.”
Wolff this week predicted Mrs. Trump and her legal team would lose her request for sanctions and that she would appeal to the Second Circuit and lose there, and then appeal to the Supreme Court.
“God knows what happens there,” he said, noting that the legal back and forth will add months to the legal calendar and countless costs.
“When I went into this, I knew that the major legal challenge would simply be to outlast them,” he said. “We actually might have the resources to, in fact, outlast them, which is the thing that most profoundly freaks them out.”
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