Judge rules Mary Trump can publicize her book
NEW YORK — Mary Trump can talk about the highly critical book she wrote about her uncle, President Donald Trump, over the objections of the president’s brother, a judge ruled in lifting an order that had blocked her from publicizing or distributing her work. The book was published Tuesday.
State Supreme Court Judge Hal B. Greenwald in Poughkeepsie, New York, rejected arguments by the brother, Robert Trump, that Mary Trump is blocked from talking about family members publicly by an agreement relatives made to settle the estate of her father after his death.
The judge said Monday that the confidentiality clauses in the 2001 agreement, “viewed in the context of the current Trump family circumstances in 2020, would ‘offend public policy as a prior restraint on protected speech.’”
“Notwithstanding that the Book has been published and distributed in great quantities, to enjoin Mary L. Trump at this juncture would be incorrect and serve no purpose. It would be moot,” the judge wrote.
Greenwald said the confidentiality agreement that settled multiple lawsuits mainly concerned the financial aspect of the deal, which isn’t as interesting now as it might have been two decades ago.
“On the other hand the non-confidential part of the Agreement, the Trump family relationships, may be more interesting now in 2020 with a Presidential election on the horizon,” the judge said.
He also wrote that Robert Trump had not shown any damages that the book’s publication would cause himself or the public.
Robert Trump is not frequently mentioned in the book that seeks to trace how family members were affected by the president’s father, a successful real estate owner, and how the president may have developed some of the traits that have been most apparent at the White House.
Mary Trump, a trained psychologist and Donald Trump’s only niece, wrote in the book that she had “no problem calling Donald a narcissist — he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.’”
The judge reversed orders he had issued temporarily blocking Mary Trump and her publisher, Simon & Schuster, from publishing or distributing the tellall book.
The book is titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” It was ranked No. 1 on the Amazon.com list of best-selling books.
Mary Trump’s lawyer, Theodore Boutrous Jr., said Monday that the judge “got it right in rejecting the Trump family’s effort to squelch Mary Trump’s core political speech on important issues of public concern.”