Melania Trump, the wife of US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, sued the Maryland-based publisher of the Daily Mail and a blogger on Thursday over stories about her past that she believes were “tremendously damaging,” her attorney said in a statement.
A Daily Mail story in August cited a Slovenian magazine’s report that a modelling agency which Ms Trump worked with in New York in the 1990s also served as an escort business, linking wealthy clients with women for sexual services.
Late on Thursday, the Daily Mail retracted the story in a posting on its website.
“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,” the statement said.
Ms Trump had notified the British newspaper and other news organisations on August 22 that she would take legal action, Ms Trump’s attorney, Charles Harder, said in an email at the time, calling the reports “outright lying.”
“These defendants made several statements about Mrs Trump that are 100 per cent false and tremendously damaging to her personal and professional reputation,” he said in a statement on Thursday.
The lawsuit alleges that the Maryland blogger, Webster Griffin Tarpley, published “false and defamatory statements” about Ms Trump.
