President Trump says his niece’s lawsuit against the family is full of “conspiracy theories” — and all just part of a plan to make money off the famous family name, according to new court papers.
In a September lawsuit, Mary accused Trump, his sister Maryanne and late brother Robert of swindling her out of tens of millions of dollars in inheritance money.
Trump and the executor for Robert’s estate are asking for the judge to throw out the suit, which they claim is time-barred and “laden with conspiracy theories more befitting a Hollywood screenplay than a pleading in a legal action,” according to court papers filed Monday.
Mary — who also fought her family in court earlier this year to publish her tell-all book — claimed her aunt and uncles schemed to cut her out of her inheritance after the passing of her dad, Fred Trump Jr., in 1981 and later her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., in 1999.
She claimed the trio siphoned money from her inherited business interests, disguising the transfers as legitimate business transactions. Then, she alleges, they made her interests appear to be worth less than they actually were through bogus appraisals and financial statements — before using threats to make her sign an agreement cutting herself out of her granddad’s estate.
But Trump fired back, claiming that Mary contrived “a decades-long sinister plot” casting “herself as the unknowing and unsophisticated victim” when she actually “orchestrated a sophisticated plan to exact retribution for decades old, previously litigated family grievances to further her own political agenda and cash in on her family name,” the court documents allege.
The president alleges in the new documents that his niece’s suit is an attempt “to get a second bite at the apple” at a time when there is “political bias” against her aunt and uncles, despite the fact that she was fully aware of the agreement she signed when she settled with her grandfather’s estate in 2001.
Trump’s camp says it’s disingenuous for Mary to claim she only discovered the alleged scheme after a New York Times story was published on the matter in October 2018, since Mary was the one who provided the paper with the documents for the story.
“At no time was [Mary] forced to relinquish her interests in the family businesses during this litigation,” the court filing says.
Mary’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said in a statement, “While it is true that Mary Trump is surely no fan of Donald Trump or his administration’s policies, that intra-family fraud is what this case is about.
“And the Trump siblings’ argument that Mary’s complaint comes too late makes no sense since the facts that the Trumps were engaged in such misconduct only came to light recently as a result of the important reporting by journalists at the New York Times and elsewhere.”