Mary: Don has tax woe so book’s OK
President Trump’s tax fraud invalidates any legal requirement his niece not publish her tell-all book about The Donald, her attorney argues a new legal filing.
Mary Trump signed a confidentiality agreement in 2001 in connection with a family dispute over the estate of Fred Trump Sr., President Trump’s father.
That agreement is at the center of an ongoing lawsuit brought by President Trump’s brother, Robert Trump, seeking to block Mary’s upcoming book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
Mary Trump says in an affidavit filed late Thursday in Dutchess County Supreme Court that the confidentiality agreement is invalid due to a bombshell New York Times story in 2018 that found President Trump committed tax fraud in the 1990s.
“The New York Times’s detailed analysis and investigation revealed for the first time that the valuations on which I had relied in entering into the Settlement Agreement, and which were used to determine my compensation under the Agreement, were fraudulent. I relied on the false valuations provided to me by my uncles and aunt, and would never have entered into the Agreement had I known the true value of the assets involved,” Mary Trump says.
Her attorney, Ted Boutrous, argued that the fraud invalidated any confidentiality agreement.
Robert Trump “and his siblings induced Ms. Trump into accepting the Settlement Agreement by massively misrepresenting the value of the assets in which Ms. Trump had an interest,” he wrote.
“Ms. Trump relied on these misrepresentations and would not have signed the Settlement Agreement had she known the truth. And because the Settlement Agreement was based on and induced by fraud, it cannot be enforced — and cannot bar publication of Ms. Trump’s book.”