Don’t mess with Melania Trump, because she’s using the time she saved plagiarising her Republican Convention speech to file legal action against the Daily Mail and a blogger from Maryland, USA.

She’s suing for $150 million (R2,2 billion) in damages, stemming from claims the Daily Mail (and blogger Webster Tarpley) made about Melania’s past.

Front and centre is the paper’s claim that Melania acted as an escort in the 1990’s, before she was swept off her feet in the loving arms of Donald. More below from the Guardian:

The Daily Mail article also contained allegations that Trump came to New York a year earlier than she has claimed, raising issues about her immigration status…

The lawsuit noted that while the article in question had been removed from the Daily Mail’s website, the newspaper had yet to apologize or formally retract. The Mail included a retraction of the story in its Friday UK print edition.

“We did not intend to state or suggest that these allegations are true,” the newspaper said, “nor did we intend to state or suggest that Mrs Trump ever worked as an ‘escort’ or in the ‘sex business’.” It added that its article had included denials from a Trump spokesperson and the owner of the modelling agency in question, and said it regretted “any such misinterpretation”…

Asked if the retraction would affect the suit, Harder replied: “It does not.”

I’m sure the Daily Mail are no strangers to libellous lawsuits, but what about this poor little blogger?

Tarpley’s blogpost, which has been retracted, claimed, per the suit, that “it is widely known Melania was not a working model but rather a high-end escort” and that she had a “mental breakdown” after a plagiarism controversy over her speech to the Republican national convention in Cleveland in July.

It turns out that adding Tarpley [pictured above] to the lawsuit may be a case of ‘legal manoeuvring’, an effort to prevent the suit being moved to federal court. Still, it’s not all going Melania’s way. Here’s lawyer Steve Klepper:

“Montgomery County has possibly the highest-percentage college education jury pool in the whole country and I cannot see how the jury pool would be good for [Melania Trump].”

As with most things Trump, educated folk usually means bad news.

In the words of Forrest Gump – stupid is as stupid does.

[source:guardian]