Donald Trump sued by his lesbian niece Mary after ‘cheating’ her out of tens of millions of dollars
Donald Trump’s neice has hit him with a multi-million dollar lawsuit (Drew Angerer/Getty)
Donald Trump is being sued for fraud by his niece Mary Trump, who claims her uncle and his siblings deliberately cheated her out of tens of millions of dollars.
The lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Thursday (September 24) includes multiple claims of fraud, concealment and civil conspiracy, among a myriad of allegations.
The president is said to have conspired over several decades with Mary’s aunt, former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, and uncle Robert Trump (who died last month), to squeeze her out of the family business and deprive her of her multi-million dollar inheritance.
For the Trumps, “fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life”, the suit claims.
“They lied. Rather than protect Mary’s interests, they designed and carried out a complex scheme to siphon funds away from her interests, conceal their grift, and deceive her about the true value of what she had inherited,” it adds.
It is alleged that the family presented themselves as Mary Trump’s protectors while secretly taking her share of minority interests in the family’s extensive real estate holdings.
The suit claims Mary Trump was pressured into accepting a settlement after being led by her aunts and uncles to believe their father’s estate was worth $30 million, the Associated Press reported.
“All told, they fleeced her of tens of millions of dollars or more,” the suit states, explaining that the alleged “fraud perpetrated by Donald, Maryanne and Robert” came to light after a 2018 New York Times investigation valued said estate as being worth more than $1 billion.
Mary Trump first made her claims in her tell-all memoir.
Many of the lawsuit’s accusations were laid out in Mary Trump’s scathing tell-all memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
In the book, Mary says she was cut out of her grandfather’s will as a result of her father’s death. She claims her uncle Robert Trump told her she was excluded because her father died of alcoholism, and wasn’t around to inherit a share of the fortune. She also says her grandfather disliked her mother.
Mary Trump’s explosive memoir about her uncle Donald Trump went on sale in July, against her family’s wishes (Ron Adar/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty)
Mary Trump also accused her uncle Donald Trump of trying to “steal vast sums of money from his siblings” by secretly trying to change his dying father’s will to write his siblings out of control of the family’s fortune.
Because Mary was a teenager at the time of her father’s death in 1981, a lawyer named Irwin Durben was appointed to act on her behalf with regards to her inheritance.
But according to the lawsuit, Durben was “irredeemably conflicted” and sided with Mary’s family members over her own interests, and “ultimately acquiesced in defendants’ campaign to squeeze her out of the family business entirely.”
In a statement accompanying the lawsuit, Mary Trump says they “betrayed me… by telling lie after lie about the value of what I had inherited and by conning me into giving everything away for a fraction of its true value.”
The suit adds that the fraud “was particularly egregious and morally culpable because defendants deliberately targeted her because they disliked her“.
Trump has not publicly responded to the lawsuit but has referred to his niece as being “unstable.”
Robert Trump attempted to secure an injunction and restraining order to block the book’s publication, but this was denied. The memoir was published in July despite the Trumps’ best efforts to quash it.
