British Paper ‘The Telegraph’ To Pay Melania Trump “Substantial” Damages For False Report

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper said Saturday it apologizes “unreservedly” to First Lady Melania Trump and her family for any embarrassment caused by the content of a now-retracted cover story it published on Jan. 19. The paper confirmed the story contained many false statements regarding Melania’s family and modeling career. It has also agreed to pay damages to the First Lady of the United States.

“As a mark of our regret we have agreed to pay Mrs.Trump substantial damages as well as her legal costs,” The Telegraph said. The newspaper did not disclose the size of the settlement.

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In a three-paragraph apology released Saturday, the Telegraph retracted several claims that were published last week in the paper’s magazine publication. “The mystery of Melania,” which is no longer online, wrongly characterized Melania’s father’s personality, falsely reported the reasons she left an architecture program, incorrectly reported her career as a model was unsuccessful prior to meeting Donald Trump and falsely stated the year when the couple first met.

The British news outlet originally reported that Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs, was a “fearsome presence” who controlled the family and that the first lady left a university in Slovenia, where she was studying design and architecture, because of an exam. The paper admitted that those assertions were false – Melania’s father was not “a fearsome presence” and “did not control the family,” as alleged in the article. It also retracted that Melania did not leave her design and architecture course for reasons relating to the completion of an exam, but because she wanted to pursue a successful career as a professional model.

“We accept that Mrs.Trump was a successful professional model in her own right before she met her husband and obtained her own modeling work without his assistance,” the paper now stated.

The Telegraph’s apology further said that Melania and Donald Trump met in New York in 1998, not in 1996, as the story stated. The article also stated that Melania’s mother, father and sister relocated to New York in 2005 to live in buildings the president owned and that the first lady cried on the night of the 2016 presidential election. Those statements, too, were false, the Telegraph said, one of Britain’s leading broadsheet newspapers that is traditionally aligned with the Conservative Party.

President Trump weighed in on the matter on Sunday, responding to a tweet by Fox News’s Brit Hume about the Telegraph story.

In a statement of her own, the First Lady’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, also slammed the news outlet and journalist Nina Burleigh.

The Telegraph’s magazine cover story, “The Mystery Of Melania,” was an excerpt from the book The Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women, by Nina Burleigh. Burleigh criticized the Telegraph on Twitter on Saturday for apologizing “for some accurate reporting” in her book.

“The book has been out since October and excerpted widely by various U.S. publications without a peep of objection. I stand by my reporting,” Burleigh told the Daily Beast.

This is not the first time Melania has successfully challenged the British press over stories about her career. She received an unspecified amount of damages and an apology from the Daily Mail in April of 2017 for an article that alleged “she provided services beyond simply modeling,” according to a statement released at that time.

The first lady also sued a Maryland blogger who reported that she once worked as a high-end escort. Trump settled in February 2017 and the blogger, Webster Tarpley, agreed to apologize and pay her a “substantial sum.”