First lady Melania Trump is demanding that Hunter Biden apologize for and retract remarks he made linking her to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and is seeking $1 billion in damages.
Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, made the comments in a July interview with YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan. In that conversation, he alleged that Epstein introduced Melania Trump to her husband, President Donald Trump, citing author Michael Wolff as the source.
In an Aug. 6 letter, Melania Trump’s attorney called Hunter Biden’s statements “false, disparaging, defamatory,” and “extremely salacious.”
The letter, sent by Miami lawyer Alejandro Brito, cited Florida’s pre-suit defamation statute and warned that failure to issue an immediate retraction would leave the first lady “no choice but to pursue any and all legal rights and remedies available to her to recover the overwhelming financial and reputational harm that you have caused her to suffer.”
It specifically objects to Hunter Biden’s allegations in the video that “Epstein introduced Melania to [Donald] Trump” and that “Jeffrey Epstein introduced Melania, that’s how Melania and the President met, according to Michael Wolff.”
The president voiced support for his wife’s legal action.
“Well, I said go forward,” he said in an Aug. 13 interview on Fox Radio.
“I’ve done pretty well in these lawsuits lately. Jeffrey Epstein has nothing to do with Melania. But they do that to demean, but it’s different stories. I did meet her through another person, but it wasn’t Jeffrey Epstein. I told her to go ahead and do it; she was very upset about it.”
In a YouTube video posted on Aug. 14, Callaghan showed the letter from Melania Trump’s lawyer to Hunter Biden and offered him a chance to apologize.
“That’s not going to happen,” Hunter Biden replied, saying his remarks were based on Wolff’s reporting.
He claimed that Wolff obtained the information from Epstein himself during an interview and that New York Times reporters Edward Carney and Maggie Haberman had made essentially identical claims in their reporting.
Hunter Biden called the defamation threat a “distraction.”
Epstein killed himself in his jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial. Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking.
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