From the Guardian [and no, I didn't edit the word "billion" out of my excerpt. The absurd but relevant fact the Melania was claiming over $1bn in damages was omitted from the original story.]
The statements were false, defamatory and “extremely salacious”, Melania Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, said in a letter to [Hunter] Biden. Biden’s remarks were widely disseminated on social media and reported by media outlets around the world, causing the first lady “to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm”, he added.
...
“Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep,” Biden said in one of the comments that the first lady disputes. Biden attributed the claim to the author Michael Wolff. Donald Trump has accused Wolff of making up stories to sell books.
...“What I said is what I have heard and seen reported and written primarily from Michael Wolff, but also dating back to 2019.” He cited a number of publications, including the New York Times and Vanity Fair, as sources of his information.
The first lady’s threats echo a favoured strategy of her husband, who has aggressively used litigation to go after critics. Public figures such as the Trumps face a high bar to succeed in a defamation lawsuit.
The president also responded to the issue, accusing Biden of fabricating stories to denigrate the first lady. Trump told Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade on Thursday morning that he had encouraged her to sue.
>“I said go forward. You know, I’ve done pretty well on these lawsuits lately … and Jeffrey Epstein had nothing to do with Melania and introducing,” [side note: if Jake Tapper is actually interested in the cognitive decline of presidents, Trump's increasing;y Yoda-like syntax might be worth talking about -- MP] he told Kilmeade.“But they do that to demean, they make up stories. I mean I can tell you exactly how it was and it was another person actually … but it wasn’t Jeffrey Epstein. “I told her go ahead and do it.”
Every reporter, every editor, every commentator discussing this story knows what’s going on. This is a bluff.
It is true that the Trumps have a long history of meritless harassment suits. It is also true that Trump managed to put some extraordinarily biased and unethical judges on the bench, and such a judge could put an awfully large thumb on the scales. But even under ideal conditions for the plaintiff, the chances of successfully suing someone for repeating charges that have been widely reported in multiple books—most recently the widely publicized Prince Andrew biography Entitled—and in publications ranging from The New York Times to New York Magazine to Vanity Fair, is vanishingly unlikely.
Over the past few months, casual observers have learned a great deal about Epstein and Maxwell: how he was a pathologically compulsive social climber with hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, while she was incredibly gifted at working that system. An amazing number of rich, powerful, and famous people at some point socialized with Epstein, but most of those people had fairly limited contact with the man. And absolutely none of them—even Prince Andrew—were as closely intertwined as were the Trumps.
Even with the most sympathetic/corrupt judge imaginable doing everything in their power to limit the damage, the discovery phase and the trial would make the publicity we’ve seen so far seem absolutely understated, not to mention the perjury trap both the Trumps would walk into testifying under oath about their relationships with Epstein. Even if literally nothing came out in the trial that we didn’t already know about, it would still be a disaster for the White House.
Every single person covering the story knows all of this, but as far as I can tell, none have found a way (assuming they wanted to) to convey this information in their reporting. The article I just quoted came from The Guardian, for Christ’s sake, and even they couldn’t bring themselves to call a spade a spade.
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