It was last year August when The Daily Mail published an article with the headline:

Racy photos and troubling questions about his wife’s past that could derail Trump

The lurid allegations apparently “lost her millions of dollars in potential business” and so Melania Trump took the news agency to court, suing the “publisher of the Daily Mail in Britain and also filing a $150 million (R2 billion) lawsuit against it in New York,” reports ABC.

In September, The Daily Mail retracted the article, publishing this instead, which broke down what the article consisted of and why they retracted it. You see, the original article had said that Melania worked as an escort in the 1990s, offering “services beyond simply modelling”.

Now, it is reported that The Daily Mail settled for about $2.9 million (R40 million) for both lawsuits, and had to publish an apology as a part of the settlement.

Here it is:

The Mail Online website and the Daily Mail newspaper published an article on 20th August 2016 about Melania Trump which questioned the nature of her work as a professional model, and republished allegations that she provided services beyond simply modelling. The article included statements that Mrs. Trump denied the allegations and Paulo Zampolli, who ran the modelling agency, also denied the allegations, and the article also stated that there was no evidence to support the allegations. The article also claimed that Mr and Mrs Trump may have met three years before they actually met, and “staged” their actual meeting as a “ruse.”

We accept that these allegations about Mrs Trump are not true and we retract and withdraw them. 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.

While the target, at the time, made sense, I would love to think The Daily Mail has learnt its lesson – however, logging onto their site shows us otherwise. They are still the kings of online tabloid news.

[source:dailymail&abc]