Trump Family Feud Headed To Court
This won’t go past discovery, though it would be a lot more entertaining if it did, but Donald Trump is suing Mary Trump, among others.
Donald Trump’s suit alleges that the New York Times influenced Mary Trump to help them acquire confidential documents despite a settlement agreement that she had signed after a legal challenge to Fred Trump Sr.’s will. In her 2020 book “Too Much and Never Enough,” Mary Trump detailed how she helped the reporters obtain Donald Trump’s financial records.
At 3 a.m. one day in 2017, she took 19 boxes of documents from Farrell Fritz, the law firm that helped her challenge the estate of Fred Trump Sr., and handed them over to the journalists. A lawyer at the firm had told her she was entitled to take the documents, as long as at least one copy was left behind, Mary Trump said.
“It wasn’t enough for me to volunteer at an organization helping Syrian refugees,” she wrote. “I had to take Donald down.”
In 2020, Mary Trump also sued Donald Trump and two of the former president’s siblings, saying that they defrauded her out of tens of millions of dollars decades ago by allegedly manipulating the value of properties and lying to her about the worth of her inheritance.
News of Donald Trump’s lawsuit was first reported by the Daily Beast. Mary Trump told the news website that the legal action was motivated by “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.”
A spokeswoman for the Times said that the paper’s coverage of Donald Trump’s taxes “helped inform citizens through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest. This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations, and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”
Mary Trump didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
“I knocked on Mary Trump’s door. She opened it,” tweeted Craig on Wednesday. “I think they call that journalism.”
We really shouldn’t be pining for entertaining court cases, but I agree, that one would be.Report
The Times has a significant advantage here. It can attract good lawyers and it pays them.Report
Very Rich Fred Trump (Don’s dad) died in 1999, leaving a ton of money to be divided equally among his children and $200k for each grandkid.
Mary’s Father (i.e. one of those children) died in 1981 of a Heart Attack caused by alcoholism.
Fred never changed his will to give more to the grandkids who had dead parents, so in effect she and her brother were dis-inherited.
Given the number of years, the whole “alcoholism” thing, and Mary being gay, this seems to have been done deliberately.
So Donald Trump got hundreds of millions of dollars and she got $200k and clearly thinks that lots of money was stolen from her.Report