US First Lady Melania Trump accepted damages and an apology on Wednesday to settle US and British lawsuits against British tabloid The Daily Mail, which had claimed she once ‘provided services beyond simply modelling.’ The newspaper issued a prominent apology on the home page of its website.
‘We accept that these allegations about Mrs Trump are not true and we retract and withdraw them,’ it said, referring to the allegations it had made in August about the wife of US President Donald Trump.
‘We apologize to Mrs Trump for any distress that our publication caused her,’ it said.
‘To settle Mrs Trump's two lawsuits against us, we have agreed to pay her damages and costs.’ Trump's lawyer, John Kelly, said the Daily Mail had provided no evidence to support its claims that a New York modelling agency she had once worked for had also provided escort services, or that the Trumps had met three years earlier than they told the public.
‘The allegations strike at the heart of the claimant's personal integrity and dignity,’ Kelly told the High Court in London.
‘The claimant has not acted as alleged,’ he said. ‘The suggestion that such allegations even merit investigation is deeply offensive and has caused a great deal of upset and distress to the claimant.’ Catrin Evans, a lawyer for the newspaper, confirmed that the Daily Mail had agreed to retract the claims in its story.
‘The defendant is here today publicly to set the record straight, and to apologize to the claimant for any distress and embarrassment that the articles may have caused her,’ Evans said.
The lawyers gave no details of the settlement reached, but the Financial Times quoted a source as saying costs and damages totalling about 3 million dollars would be paid to Trump, a fraction of the original 150 million dollars reportedly sought by her lawyers.
In its apology, the newspaper admitted it had ‘questioned the nature of her work as a professional model, and republished allegations that she provided services beyond simply modelling.’ The retracted story also claimed that ‘Mr and Mrs Trump may have met three years before they actually met, and 'staged' their actual meeting as a 'ruse.'‘
