First lady Melania Trump settled a defamation lawsuit against a Maryland blogger after he retracted the statements and apologized to the Trump family.
In August, blogger Webster Tarpley had falsely claimed that Trump had been a “high-end escort” in the 1990s and had a “nervous breakdown” due to the stress of the presidential campaign.
Tarpley on Tuesday put out a statement apologizing to the first lady and her family, according to Trump’s lawyers. “I posted an article on August 2, 2016, about Melania Trump that was replete with false defamatory statements about her. I had no legitimate factual basis to make these false statements and I fully retract them. I acknowledge that these false statements were very harmful and hurtful to Mrs. Trump, her son, her husband and her parents for making these false statements,” said Tarpley, who runs the blog tarpley.net.
Trump’s lawyers said Tarpley has agreed to pay her a “substantial sum” as a settlement, according to multiple reports.
Trump filed a lawsuit in September against the online Daily Mail and other publications that published an article along the same lines. A Maryland judge dismissed the lawsuit on Feb. 2 against the corporation that publishes the Daily Mail’s website.
Melania Trump refiled the $150 million lawsuit on Monday after the judge dismissed the case.
According to her lawyers, Trump said the case kept her from cashing in on her role as first lady. The lawsuit claimed that the “plaintiff had the unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as an extremely famous and well-known person … to launch a broad-based commercial brand in multiple product categories, each of which could have garnered multi-million dollar business relationships for a multi-year term during which plaintiff is one of the most photographed women in the world.”
Tarpley, with several publications, retracted his statements on his website in August.
