The publisher of a forthcoming tell-all book by President Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, said in a late-night legal filing that it was unaware of her nondisclosure agreement until about two weeks ago and has already printed 75,000 copies and shipped thousands of them.
“We did not learn anything about Ms. Trump signing any agreement concerning her ability to speak about her litigation with her family until shortly after press broke concerning Ms. Trump’s Book about two weeks ago,” Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp said in an affidavit obtained by the Washington Post. “And we never saw any purported agreement until this action was filed against Ms. Trump and Simon & Schuster.”
In his affidavit, Karp also confirmed that Mary Trump was the principal source for a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation into the president’s taxes.
“Knowing that no litigation resulted from the Times article, we were entirely confident in Ms. Trump’s ability to tell her story regarding her own family,” Karp said.
He added that “thousands” of copies “have already been shipped.”
A judge on Tuesday sided with the president’s brother in his bid to halt the book’s publication, warning Simon & Schuster not to leak the contents of the book. The publisher plans to appeal the ruling.
The publisher also plans to argue that suppressing the book would be unconstitutional.
The book, titled Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, is scheduled to hit shelves on July 28.
