Author Michael Wolff dismissed a lawsuit threat from first lady Melania Trump and announced Thursday he will be publishing his insights from interviews with the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Wolff announced on Instagram on Wednesday that he was “notified by lawyers for the first lady that they intend to sue me for a billion dollars” over his comments on audio tapes he recorded of Epstein allegedly describing his relationship with the president and first lady. The author accused the Trumps of engaging in a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation suit, otherwise known as a SLAPP suit.
“They may have no hope whatsoever of proving defamation, but these suits are filed anyway, or these suits are threatened to intimidate people from talking about this exact subject. I can’t live like that,” Wolff said.
“In fact, to be perfectly honest, I’d like nothing better than to get Donald Trump and Melania Trump under oath in front of a court reporter and actually find out all of the details of their relationship with Epstein turning the tables on the Trumps and refusing to acquiesce to them,” Wolff added.
As a result of the alleged threat, Wolf explained that his lawyers had preemptively filed for a declaratory judgment on Tuesday, which would allow him subpoena power to call witnesses in order to prove the veracity of his claims. By the time of Wolff’s Thursday Instagram post, he did not provide an update to the legal battle, but reiterated his claims that Trump was close to Epstein.
“[I]n all the many hours of conversation I had with Jeffrey Epstein, he emphasized the closeness of his relationship to Donald Trump,” Wolff said. “Basically from the late 80’s through to 2004 they were entirely involved in each other’s lives, in their social lives, their business lives, their sexual lives.”
Wolff claimed that Epstein said of Trump, “We are the same person. I know the secrets.”
These tapes, released on Wolff’s Fire and Fury podcast, were created in 2017 and have about 100 hours of Epstein discussing the Trump White House. Epstein would go on to die in prison in 2019, roughly a month after his arrest.
White House spokesman Steven Cheung told the Washington Examiner this latest venture from Wolff will come from “his sick and warped imagination” over factual evidence.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s*** and has been proven to be a fraud,” Cheung said to the Washington Examiner. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
Wolff has written four books on Trump, with the most popular being Fire and Fury. The book centered on Trump’s first year during his first term and sold over 2 million copies. Before Trump took office the second time, his campaign staff, which would go onto various White House positions, signed a letter committing not to respond to Wolff’s “bad faith inquiries.”
In November 2024, when Wolff began releasing his tapes of Epstein, Karoline Leavitt referred to Wolff as “a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books.”
The first lady has succeeded in retracting statements suggesting that Epstein introduced her to her now husband. HarperCollinsUK removed passages in Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York that made the allegation. This followed the Daily Beast and Democratic commentator James Carville in issuing apologies for repeating the claim that Epstein was tied to the Trumps’ meeting.
According to Nick Clemens, communications director for the first lady, her attorneys are still pursuing apologies.
TRUMP CAMPAIGN OFFICIALS DENOUNCE MICHAEL WOLFF NEW BOOK
“First Lady Melania Trump’s attorneys are actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies by those who spread malicious, defamatory falsehoods,” Clemens said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The true account of how the First Lady met President Trump is in her best-selling book, Melania.”
The Washington Examiner has reached out to Wolff for comment.