First Lady Melania Trump has demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments he made linking her to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, threatening legal action for “over $1bn” if he does not issue an apology.
Lawyers for Trump object to two statements made by Biden, son of former president Joe Biden, in a YouTube interview he gave to British journalist Andrew Callaghan last month.
In the sprawling discussion in question, Hunter Biden alleged that it was Epstein who first introduced Melania to Donald Trump in the late 1990s, when she was a fashion model and he a luxury property magnate with no known political aspirations.
The statements are false, defamatory, and “extremely salacious,” Melania Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, wrote in the letter to Biden.
His remarks were widely disseminated on social media and reported by media outlets around the world, causing the first lady “to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” Brito wrote.
The letter demands that Biden walk back the claim and apologise or face legal action for “over $1bn in damages”.
It also accuses the former president’s son of having a “vast history of trading on the names of others” and repeating the claim “to draw attention to yourself.”
Biden made the Epstein comments while also lashing out at “elites” like the Hollywood actor George Clooney and others in the Democratic Party whom, he said, had undermined his father before he dropped out of last year’s presidential campaign, also revealing that Biden Sr had been on Ambien when he suffered a disastrous debate defeat to Trump in Atlanta last June.
“Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep,” Biden said in one of the comments Trump disputes.
Biden attributed the claim to author Michael Wolff, whom the president disparaged in June as a “third-rate reporter” and accused of making up stories to sell books.
The first lady’s threats echo a favored strategy of her husband, who has aggressively used litigation to go after critics. Public figures like the Trumps face a high bar to succeed in a defamation lawsuit.
The president and first lady have long said they were introduced by Paolo Zampolli, a modeling agent, at a New York Fashion Week party in 1998.
The letter to Hunter Biden is dated August 6 and was first reported on Wednesday by Fox News Digital.
Abbe Lowell, a lawyer who has represented Biden in his criminal cases and to whom Brito's letter is addressed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Wednesday.
President Trump continues to face questions about his past friendship with Epstein, but has not been accused of any wrongdoing and is currently suing The Wall Street Journal for reporting that he once sent the sex offender a “bawdy” doodle for his birthday.
The uproar over the disgraced financier has raged ever since the Justice Department and FBI ruled in early July that he left behind no “client list” and died by suicide in August 2019, a verdict that enraged the president’s supporters, who continue to demand answers and allege a “cover-up” to protect influential people.
It has been reported that the president was briefed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who stated that his name appears in the government’s files on Epstein, but that does not imply misconduct.
Trump is known to have become increasingly frustrated at the story’s continued dominance of the news agenda over the past six weeks and has even rebuked members of his own conservative coalition for obsessing over it.
Additional reporting by agencies.
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