Former president Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit in New York against estranged niece and author, Mary Trump.
The lawsuit, which was also filed against New York Times reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow, and Russ Buettner, alleges that they were involved in an “insidious plot” to obtain his private tax records for a story, the Daily Beast reports. The lawsuit alleges that Times reporters coerced Mary Trump into providing them with information even though she had previously signed a confidentiality agreement following a legal battle over the will of deceased family patriarch Fred Trump.
Craig, Barstow, and Buettner won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for the story, which revealed how little the former president had paid in federal income tax.
The lawsuit alleges that the parties involved “were motivated, at least in part, by their actual malice towards Plaintiff,” CNN reports, claiming that the journalists “unjustly reaped significant personal, professional, and/or business-related benefit(s), including, but not limited to, monetary gain, fame, acclaim, notoriety, inflated market valuation, increased revenue, and/or career advancement.”
The suit also states that the former president is seeking “damages in an amount to be determined at trial, but believed to be no less than One Hundred Million Dollars.”
“I think he is a f*cking loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can,” said Mary Trump in a statement reported by the Daily Beast. “It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”
Mary Trump’s memoir, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” was released in 2020. Her uncle, Robert Trump, had previously filed a lawsuit to stop the book from being published. However, a judge ruled that the confidentiality agreement “had been too vaguely defined to stop her from writing about the sitting president,” the Daily Beast writes.
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