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Donald Trump’s niece says a recent ruling in the sexual abuse lawsuit against Prince Andrew bolsters her own case against the former president over her inheritance.
A lawyer for Mary Trump on Thursday pointed to the decision in Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s civil case against the royal — which slapped down his arguments that he was legally protected by her 2009 settlement agreement with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
One of the issues in contention in Mary Trump’s suit, which accuses her family of swindling her out of her full inheritance, is a 2001 settlement agreement that Donald Trump has argued releases him and the Trump family from her claims.
Mary Trump’s lawyers have opposed the former president’s motion to dismiss her case, claiming her lawyer at the time of the 2001 settlement was colluding with her family to deceive her and get her to agree to a bad deal.
Mary Trump’s lawyers argued that the case needed to play out and information needed to be exchanged between both sides before a judge could decide on whether the settlement let her family off the hook for her claims.
In her Thursday letter to Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Robert Reed, Mary Trump’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan pointed to Manhattan federal Judge Lewis Kaplan’s ruling in the Giuffre suit in arguing that Reed should side with Mary Trump and deny the family’s motions to dismiss.
“Judge Kaplan … in denying a motion to dismiss based on the scope of a prior release, reiterated the same principle that Your Honor [Reed] discussed with the parties at oral argument earlier this week — namely, that ‘it is not open to the court now to decide, as a matter of fact, just what the parties to the release … actually meant,’” Roberta Kaplan wrote in the letter.
Roberta Kaplan and lawyers for Donald Trump and his siblings did not immediately return requests for comment.
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