Mary Trump: You Can’t Gag Me Because Settlement Was a ‘Fraud’
The president’s niece wants a judge to remove a temporary restraining order blocking her from writing a tell-all.
Illustration by The Daily Beast
The legal fight over a tell-all by President Donald Trump’s niece took another turn on Thursday when her lawyers filed papers to remove a temporary restraining order, arguing that the confidentiality agreement she signed 19 years ago was an unenforceable fraud.
In an affidavit, Mary Trump said that when she inked the agreement, ending a dispute over her grandfather’s will, she believed the asset amounts in it were accurate, but learned they were bogus from a New York Times expose.
In addition, she said that she did not believe the agreement would have barred her from telling her “life story”—which just happens to include details of “the conduct and character of my uncle, the sitting President of the United States.”
And, she noted, President Trump “has spoken out about our family and the will dispute on numerous occasions”—suggesting that would have rendered any secrecy agreement void.
“None of the parties to the Settlement Agreement, including my uncles Donald Trump and Robert Trump, or my aunt Maryanne Trump, has ever sought my permission to speak publicly about our family or their personal relationships with me, my brother Fred, or among each other,” she wrote.
In their petition to the New York Supreme Court, Mary Trump’s lawyers wrote that it’s clear the president and his family “do not want the American public to hear” their client’s story.
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“But the First Amendment, ordinary rules of contract law, and bedrock equitable principles defeat Plaintiff’s extraordinary and unwarranted request for injunctive relief,” they wrote.
The Daily Beast was the first to report Mary Trump had written a “harrowing and salacious” tell-all in which she will “out” herself as the primary source for the Times’ Pulitzer-winning Trump tax investigation revealing the president received more than $400 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire and had been involved in “fraudulent” tax schemes.
President Trump’s brother Robert, fresh out of a neurosurgery ICU, filed court papers last month to stop publication of the book, Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which is due to hit shelves July 28 and is already No. 1 on Amazon’s best-sellers list.
Robert Trump secured a temporary restraining order against Simon & Schuster and Mary Trump. This week, an appeals court tossed the order against the publishing company—and now Mary is arguing hers should be lifted, too.
Her lawyers wrote that Robert Trump “cannot succeed on the merits of his contractual claims because the confidentiality provision in the decades-old Settlement Agreement of financial disputes that Plaintiff invokes is unenforceable and inapplicable.”
Robert Trump’s celebrity attorney, Charles Harder, did not respond to a request for comment.
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