Melania Trump sues the UK Daily Mail and blogger for $150m over reports that she was an 'escort' in the 90s

US: Melania Trump, wife of US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, has sued the US-based publisher of the Daily Mail Online and a blogger over stories making false and defamatory statements about her supposedly being an escort in the 1990s.

A Daily Mail story in August cited a Slovenian magazine’s report that a modeling agency that Melania worked with in New York in the 1990s also served as an escort business, linking rich clients with women for sexual services. 

The Daily Mail in a post on it's website on Thursday September 1st, withdrew the story. It reads;

"To the extent that anything in the Daily Mail’s article was interpreted as stating or suggesting that Mrs. Trump worked as an ‘escort’ or in the ‘sex business’… is hereby retracted, and the Daily Mail newspaper regrets any such misinterpretation"

On August 22, Melania through her attorney Charles Harder in an email informed the British newspaper and other news organizations that she would take legal action, calling the reports "outright lying."

"These defendants made several statements about Mrs. Trump that are 100 percent false and tremendously damaging to her personal and professional reputation," he said in a statement on Thursday.

The lawsuit filed in state circuit court in Montgomery County, Maryland, alleges that the Maryland blogger, Webster Griffin Tarpley, published "false and defamatory statements" about Melania Trump, including that the former model had suffered from “a full-blown nervous breakdown."

"Defendants’ actions are so egregious, malicious and harmful to Mrs. Trump that her damages are estimated at 150 million dollars," her lawyer’s statement said

Tarpley said in a statement that the lawsuit is without merit. 

"We are confident that Mrs. Trump will not be able to meet her high burden of proving the statements published about her on my website were defamatory in any way," he said.

Source: Daily Mail