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Melania Trump urged a federal court earlier this week to sanction journalist Michael Wolff, after he unsuccessfully sued the first lady in an effort to thwart a $1 billion defamation lawsuit.
In a motion filed in the Southern District of New York Tuesday, the first lady demanded that Wolff provide appropriate relief and pay for costs and attorneys’ fees incurred as she fought back against the “Fire and Fury” author’s lawsuit.
Melania’s legal team accused Wolff of turning “a serious, looming defamation suit against Plaintiff based on his wrongdoing into a fundraising drive and a political spectacle,” in the 26-page motion.
“[Wolff] falsely accused Mrs. Trump of being tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s misconduct, and when she demanded a retraction, he did not respond,” the filing continued. “He instead raced to a New York court to try and get improper, advance approval of his statements, promoted the suit across his own media platforms, and used it to raise more than $836,000.
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“The Court saw through the maneuver.”
Melania’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, had sent Wolff a letter last year demanding that he retract statements alleging the first lady had been associated with notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.
Brito warned Wolff that the first lady would sue him for $1 billion if he didn’t.
The letter prompted Wolff to file a lawsuit against Melania last October.
Manhattan Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil tossed Wolff’s lawsuit in May, describing it as “contorted almost beyond recognition.”
“Plaintiff asks for a declaration that, if the First Lady sues him, he deserves to win. That is not how the federal courts work,” Vyskocil wrote in her ruling dismissing the lawsuit.
Melania’s legal team argued that sanctions against Wolff were warranted regardless of whether a court deems the author’s statements against her to be defamatory or not.
“Plaintiff filed a patently meritless lawsuit and used it to harass Mrs. Trump in public,” the motion stated. “The requested sanctions do not depend on a ruling that Plaintiff’s statements were defamatory.
“They rest on the unsupported and mischaracterized federal submissions, the use of those papers for improper purposes, counsel’s multiplication of the federal proceedings, and the Court’s findings that the action itself was abusively presented as textbook bad-faith forum-shopping.”
The first lady’s legal team added: “Those independent grounds support sanctions against Plaintiff and his counsel.”
Melania has vehemently denied any association with Epstein, who died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges.
Meanwhile, Wolff exchanged more than 1,000 messages with the deceased pedophile and even called Epstein his “good friend,” a trove of documents released by the Justice Department earlier this year showed.
Lawyers for Wolff and the first lady did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
