Melania Trump, wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, is bringing a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Mail, a United Kingdom-based tabloid that alleged she worked as a call girl in Milan in the 1990s.
Though the Mail operates out of the U.K., it has a massive international presence. The story was carried by other outlets after original publication in the Mail.
The story, published Friday, features a nude image of Trump. It suggests she may have worked as a fille de joie while working for a modeling agency in Milan, citing a recently published unauthorized biography called “From The Whore House To The White House: The True Story Of Melania Trump.”
The story also raises questions concerning Trump’s immigration status during her early years in the United States, and suggests the Trumps may have intentionally obfuscated the date their relationship began to conceal an affair from Donald Trump’s second wife Marla Maples.
“Mrs. Trump has placed several news organizations on notice of her legal claims against them, including Daily Mail among others, for making false and defamatory statements about her supposedly having been an ‘escort’ in the 1990s,” attorney Charles Harder said in an email to Politico’s Hadas Gold. “All such statements are 100% false, highly damaging to her reputation, and personally hurtful. She understands that news media have certain leeway in a presidential campaign, but outright lying about her in this way exceeds all bounds of appropriate news reporting and human decency.”
Paolo Zampolli, the individual who ran the Milan-based modeling agency where Trump worked, called the allegation “fucking rubbish,” in the original Mail piece.
“My agency was never was never an escort agency…come on,” he said.
Trump has vigorously denied she violated immigration laws in the United States, releasing a statement via Twitter asserting she has always been in compliance with federal immigration rules.
A number of media outlets that published reporting based on the Daily Mail piece have since issued retractions and apologies, including Bipartisan Report and Inquisitr.
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