Nothing about Donald Trump surprises us anymore, so we barely batted an eyelid when we found out that the former president is now taking legal action against a member of his own family. We’re not even kidding! According to reports, Trump has filed a $100 million lawsuit in New York against his niece Mary Trump, as well as The New York Times, over an alleged “breach of contract.”
Mary, 56, is the daughter of the 75-year-old former president’s late older brother, Fred Trump Jr, who died in 1981 at the age of 42. In the lawsuit, Trump claims that his niece shared information relating to his tax returns with three Times reporters – the journalists named as the defendants are Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner – who then printed the information, which allegedly breached a previous agreement she had made to keep the records private and confidential.
Trump’s lawsuit claims that “the defendants engaged in an insidious plot” to obtain confidential information that “they exploited for their own benefit and utilized as a means of falsely legitimizing their publicized works.” The three reporters named in the lawsuit actually won a Pulitzer Prize for their 18-month investigation of Trump’s finances that “debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges,” according to the Pulitzer website. The claim then goes on to say that, in prior litigation involving the estate of Fred Trump (Trump’s father and Mary’s grandfather) his niece also obtained “more than 40,000 pages of highly sensitive and confidential documents, including financial documents, accountings, tax records, income tax returns” and more.
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As per Trump's claim, the settlement agreement which they both signed in 2001 states that Mary "shall not directly or indirectly publish or cause to be published, any diary, memoir, story, interview, article, essay, account, or description or depiction of any kind whatsoever concerning their litigation or their litigation involving the Estate" of Fred Trump. Therefore, if she did in fact share the information without permission, then she would indeed have violated that agreement, meaning that the former president might actually have a pretty good chance of winning this case. We can't believe it!
His niece still doesn’t seem too worried about the lawsuit though, and hasn’t tried to hide the fact that she leaked the information to the press. In her tell-all book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, in which she describes her uncle as a "fraud" and a "bully," she revealed that she was the Times' source of information in its story about Trump's tax records. And that's not where her honesty ended, as she also previously told The Daily Beast that she was "proud" to have supplied the information to the reporters, and has since called her uncle's actions "desperate." Yikes!
"I think he is a loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can. It’s desperation," she said in a statement to NBC News. "The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that he thinks will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject."
We wonder how Trump will fare with this lawsuit. Let's not forget that he is also suing Twitter, in a desperate bid to try and get his account back after he was banned from the platform back in January this year following the riots at the Capitol building.
