Melania wins lawsuits

LONDON: The Daily Mail apologised to Melania Trump on Wednesday and agreed to pay damages to settle two lawsuits she had filed over an article last year asserting that the professional modelling agency she worked for in the 1990s had also been an escort service.

“We accept that these allegations about Mrs Trump are not true and we retract and withdraw them,” a lawyer for the UK paper told a judge at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

“We apologise to Mrs Trump for any distress that our publication caused her. To settle Mrs Trump’s two lawsuits against us, we have agreed to pay her damages and costs.”

Trump will be paid damages understood to be under $3m (£2.4m); the amount was not disclosed in the hearing.

She had sought compensatory and punitive damages of at least $150 million, according to the filing.

The Daily Mail published its article on Trump on August 20, quoting from a report in a magazine in Slovenia, where she was born, and a biography of her by a journalist, Bojan Pozar.

In September, Trump sued The Daily Mail in Montgomery County in Maryland, as well as in London, and the tabloid quickly published a retraction. After the Maryland court dismissed that case, saying it did not have jurisdiction, Trump filed a new case in New York.