B (3:13)

Michael, Joanna, Melania, good afternoon. The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today. The individuals lying about me are devoid of ethical standards, humility, and respect.

E (3:39)

That would be me. I think that would be me.

B (3:47)

I don't understand how, as first lady representing the country of the United States, she hasn't figured out yet how to. How to speak the language. It's just shocking to me. However, why now? Why is she coming out and making this speech now?

E (4:04)

Okay, well, you know, I think. I mean, we've had now, what, more than 24 hours of, of nobody talking about anything else but this. And I think we can reach the conclusion that nobody knows anything. Nobody has any idea why she did this. It's like, you know, reach for the stars. It makes no sense. So that should be our point of departure. And then we can go over all of the various. The various theories, and I have a few new theories perhaps, to add to this, but I think the thing is, and that we have to say, and everybody is an expert, everybody is pronouncing why. The truth is, nobody knows.

B (4:54)

Nobody knows. But you do have an ongoing legal case against her, so this is a good time to catch up with it.

E (5:00)

The recap is that I received a threatening letter from Melania and Melania's lawyers about things I had said linking her to Jeffrey Epstein. Now she puts out these letters on an almost, at this point, industrial scale. They go out. I mean, the Daily Beast has gotten them before. This particular letter was directly to me. But there are other people who actually always, as soon as somebody gets these letters, then they call me and say, oh, what do we do? And. But anyway, I got this. I got this. This letter. And then my attorney and.

B (5:44)

Give us a time, Michael. Give us a time frame. When did you get the letter?

E (5:49)

October. So the end of October, I got this. This letter. And, you know, and this is. I mean, it's kind of scary. You get a letter from the. From the first lady and effectively from the President's Lawyers. He has a. This is a pattern. This is a pattern. And people have large media organizations, I am not obviously a large media organizations, but large media organizations have gotten these letters from the president and they have folded, they've wilted, they've paid tens more than tens of millions of dollars because of these threats. So I got this $1 billion threat. I have longstanding relationship with First Amendment lawyers because I'm a writer. And I called my lawyers, I said, what do we do here? And they were rightly appalled. I mean, you have the first lady of the United States using the power of the presidency to basically intimidate someone who is saying things that she or the president does not want said. And there is virtually nothing that I said that would be considered libelous in any kind of strict legal understanding of what libel is. So my attorney said, well, in New York State, actually, to intimidate like this, to make these kinds of threats, just to keep you from saying what you have every right to say is illegal, it's called a slap action. And there is, in New York State, anti slap laws. You can't do this. It's just not. It's just, it's just a thing that you do not in the United States of America, we understand should not be done. So instead of waiting for her to sue me, which we turned around and sued her under the slap laws in the state of New York. So that happened the end of October, and that has now been. And then I launched a GoFundMe campaign which raised an enormous amount of money. I mean, from more than 25,000 individual donors. We raised more than $800,000, which certainly sent a message to the First Lady. I mean, it means that we can continue this legal action against her for quite a long time. And so we are now. And these things creep along. I mean, it's astounding how slowly they go. They made a motion to bring the case into federal court. We're in state court. We filed a suit in state court. They move to move it to federal court, which is their right. But then the federal court has to ascertain whether it is properly before the federal court. And that is where it is. Now, there are a set of motions before a federal judge in the Southern District of New York who happens to be a Trump appointed judge. And whether that's a factor or not, we don't. Whether that will be a factor, we don't know. But it is. And for this is now for almost close to eight weeks before this judge in federal court. And the issues before her are their side. They have moved to dismiss the case. Of course, we don't believe there's much a chance of that. They've also moved to remove the case to Florida, which would be a more advantageous jurisdiction for them. We, in turn, have moved to remand the case to federal, to state court. And our position there is it should be in state court because there are no federal issues. And the fact that it might properly be in federal court if she were a citizen of Florida and I was a citizen of New York. But we are arguing that that's a lie, that she is a citizen of New York. She spends most of her time here. All her business interests are here. Her family is here. Anything that would constitute a citizen relationship with a particular state is here. And that's well documented. And that evidence, or the evidence that we have gathered, is before the court. And now we've asked, if the court is not satisfied, to let us have discovery, which is to ask her for all kinds of documentary evidence, including her prenuptial agreement, for instance. The other.

B (11:15)

You've asked. Sorry, you've asked Melania Trump for her. Let's also just back up here.

E (11:21)

Yeah, we've just asked for discovery. And that's one of the things the judge has now has to decide on these issues. We're waiting for that decision, which should, might and should come any day now. So is that the reason that she has stepped forward? This is the first time a first lady would have sued journalists or media organizations who are saying things about her we understand the law provides for. I mean, almost I don't think there's any instance of a president or the first lady suing the media. Now, this has gone on repeatedly in the Trump years, of course, and we should go on. You know, the first lady, this has been really interesting, and I think that this is a key part of this. From the beginning, she has fiercely tried to protect and control her version of her life after she came to New York in the 1990s. Now, that whole story, that whole narrative has many confusing details. How did she come here? Who brought her here? Under what legal auspices? How did she work here? I mean, many, many, many details which are, you know, might be, that might have answers that she does not want the public to know, and that might be kind of complicated for her. So what she has done to that to do that is she has used the legal system to shut down questions about her life here. Notably, she sued the Daily Mail, which suggested that she might have been an escort in New York and the Daily Mail settled letter after letter after letter, threat after threat after threat to anyone who brings up this subject. So in the past, where we understood that someone was the President of the United States or someone was the first lady, they were. You know, the public has a right to know. The public has a right to discuss. The public has the right to speculate. The public has a right to literally say anything they want about. About these people who have such power in our. So this is now. This is a moment in time when the President and the first lady have decided, we're gonna push back about that we're in control. You're not. Well.

B (14:12)

And particularly notable was her documentary. Of course, the President now refers to his wife as a movie star. When asked who she was at the Easter egg hunt roll by a child, he said, oh, that's a movie star. She' movie star. But she had a full documentary when she could have addressed some of these issues. And instead, the entire documentary focuses on 20 days only in the run up to the inauguration. So there's no answer to the question that I think most people are fascinated and puzzled by, which is, how did she, as a model, get an Einstein visa, a visa which accepts that you are a person of exceptional merit to move here? Because we know that she wasn't actually a supermodel. She definitely was a model. She did catalogs, but she wasn't a supermodel. So how she got the Einstein visa for exceptional ability remains a puzzle.

E (15:17)

Yeah, and let's open that up a little more because I think the movie is important or the documentary. The documentary. Because what it does, what it inaugurates, is a Melania business. It's Melania the brand. And she is busy building a Melania brand business of extensions and how to exploit her own name, how to monetize her own name and her own position. And she's created. The documentary is an advertorial, really. It's not documenting. It's certainly not a documentary to inform us who she is. It's a documentary to create the illusion of what she wants to be a branding opportunity.

B (16:11)

So how is she branding herself, though? What is her brand? What does it stand for?

E (16:19)

Well, I would be hard pressed to say it stands for. It stands, but it seems to be. It stands for she's a glamorous woman who is somehow connected to an enormous amount of power. I mean, what else is there? I don't know. And it's this name. You know, what are brands? It's name recognition. I mean, she has a book she put out a book, Melania the book, now Melania the movie. So this is taking really a kind of a Trump, a Trump approach. Just put your name on everything, notably not the name Trump, the name Melania.

B (17:04)

Right. So it seemed to me very clearly. Well, there are so many, there are so many questions that this statement throws into the air, not least, why is she dragging attention back to the very issue that will not leave her husband alone, but very briefly, because of the war has actually taken a backseat. We know that this is an issue that enrages him, that we know that he and Jeffrey Epstein. And Jeffrey Epstein continues now to unfold as the most diabolical man in America over the last 20 years, that he and Jeffrey Epstein were very close. There are pictures of them all hanging out together. Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump, Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, now of course, in Jefferson jail for 20 years for sex trafficking. So why is she dragging the attention back to this?

E (18:06)

Well, that is the question which nobody can satisfactorily answer. And there are the theory, the perfectly reasonable theory that she is getting out ahead of something, the PR point of view. If you know that something disparaging is coming about, you be the one to say it or to anticipate it and try to modify it or to head it off. So that may be. And a lot of people are speculating about a lot of possible issues and we should get into that. But the other thing that it could, I mean, it certainly feels like is that it could be a direct dig, an assault against her husband. Who is this bad for? Who is it? Who is it bad for the most? And it would seem to be Donald Trump. This is bringing back an issue that, I mean, certainly hadn't gone away, but it had been muted, at least for the past number of weeks of the war. And here we are, front and center, no bigger issue yesterday, today and for the coming days or weeks again than Jeffrey Epstein and his relationship to the President and the first lady.

B (19:34)

And the president yesterday said that he'd had a sort of two minute conversation with her about whether or not she was going to do this. He sort of sensed or he tried to give the impression that he knew she was going to give some kind of statement, but he didn't know how. And then he said, well, if he'd been doing it, he might not have done it like this. So he seemed a, somewhat, somewhat nonplussed by the fact that she'd done that. It seemed to come as a surprise, certainly to the regular press corps who Cover the White House. Often you get a hint of what the speech is going to be Beforehand. People knew that she was booked to make a speech that was in the White House diary. But no one expected this. It was as if she deliberately kept it secret.

E (20:21)

I suspect that he was completely caught off guard by this. Cause it's so, I mean, from left field. So, yeah, I would say he knew nothing about this. And also remember, part of this statement was this invitation to Congress to go deeper to investigate more, to actually investigate the son of a bitch or husband.

B (20:55)

So if you're Donald Trump and you're thinking, well, who knows what's there? We're inside his head trying to figure out what he's thinking about the Strait of Hormuzzy. And then someone calls and says it's

E (21:05)

not inside his wife's head.

B (21:08)

Well, I was gonna say, how did he see it? Did someone call him and say, sir, you need to be watching, you should be, you know, just switch on the news. He's always watching the news anyway, so maybe it wasn't a surprise to him because she suddenly pops up and there she is. But as you say, nobody has talked about anything else because. Which of course means that there are all sorts of conspiracies going around about why this should happen. One is the case that you have. The second is the strange case of Paolo Zampoli, the owner of a modeling agency, who says. And according to Melania, he says he introduced Melania to Donald Trump at a party he was having. And that is the official version of how they met as written in her book. Melania.

E (21:56)

Yes. And Zompoli, of course, had a relationship with Epstein at the time. I mean, this whole, the, the modeling world, I mean, we're right in the, in the middle of this modeling world of the 1990s, the dirty 1990s. And, and you know, in which everybody kind of knows everybody in this, in this relatively tight knit modeling world. Everybody is investing with everybody. Epstein is invest in modeling agencies. Trump is investing in modeling agencies. Zampoli is a model. Jean Luc, what's that guy's name?

B (22:36)

Brunel.

E (22:36)

Jean Luc Brunel. You know, another completely suspicious character involved with all, all of these people. And then in the middle of this, we have, you know, I mean, Melania comes to New York, she's a model in New York dealing with all of these people. Yes, just so. But go on. That's just the background to the two.

B (22:56)

Well, this is just the background because Zampaoli ends up having a long relationship with a Brazilian model called Amanda n', Garo, with whom he has a child. They then have what appears to be an acrimonious breakup. And it becomes evident that Amanda has overstayed on her visa. And. And it appears that someone tipped off ice. She is forced to self deport back to Brazil in the middle of a custody battle for the son that she has with Zampaoli. She then goes on X and furious, it appears, and again, we're not sure if this is true, but this is one of the biggest stories that's being talked about out there. She then goes on X and posts that she is furious that Melania hasn't come to her help, that she has been close with Melania's family. There are lots of pictures of them all hanging out together as recently as 2022, and that she's prepared to tell all. Of course, nobody knows what all is or what it refers to, but it's a threatening post. It's a threatening post on X.

E (24:15)

Okay, but this is. Let's deconstruct this. This is a story that has been around for, you know, the better part of two months now. It has a story that has gotten almost no traction, social media notice, of course, you know, but certainly is not a substantial story. I mean, it's one he, you know, it really is a he said, she said, you know, marital complicated story. I mean, it seems terrible. It seems that he dropped a dime on his ex partner, on his child's mother. It seems terrible. But it was also not a story in which anyone was linking Melania to Epstein. So it was a story that was not getting much traction. It was a story that was not linking Melania to Epstein. It was a story that one had no reason to believe would mutate into a major crisis. Except now it has. Why? Because she came out and made this announcement. So she has, whatever, whatever velocity this story now has is all due to her.

B (25:39)

Well, and then to add another spark to the conspiracy fire, Donald Trump then posts a video, a horrifying video of a man bludgeoning a woman to death in Florida in a gas station, which he says he's put out to remind people how awful the Democrats are and that these are the kind of people that the Democrats welcomed into the country. The man in question is a Haitian immigrant. And so the timing of that people read into as somehow a threat from the President himself.

E (26:25)

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, everybody is reading everything into anything. So we don't know how is this informing our understanding of why Melania is suddenly made this announcement, I'm like, okay, does it tell us anything? Does it get us anywhere? Do we know? I mean, nothing has come out since she had made this, since she made this statement. So all we really still have is the statement. The statement is the news. So if the statement was made to preempt news, it certainly hasn't preempted anything and has rather, rather become the news itself. So now we have. And if this is about Melania's brand, the Melania brand is suddenly very much tied to the Epstein story because she tied it. So what is going on here? I think as things stand now, it seems to most directly track back to Melania's relationship with her husband.

B (27:42)

Okay, so we have theories. We have one that she is trying to get ahead of something. It could be related to your own case as the first person to sue a first lady with the New York anti slap suit. So it could also be asking Congress to investigate the Epstein files more. Because she wants to know about her husband. Because we know that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were friends for at least 15 years and close friends, and you've posited possibly even best friends.

E (28:17)

Why would she want to know the truth about her husband? That would be a truth that would be damaging to her husband and therefore damaging to her. Unless she wants to, doesn't, not necessarily want to know the truth. She wants to damage her husband or she wants to threaten to damage her husband. And you know, remember, we know that this is, to say the least, an unusual marriage. They basically don't live together. This relationship of the President and the first lady fits no pattern of any president and first lady heretofore.

B (29:00)

Well, and certainly people in the White House say that when she comes, she's treated as if she were a guest. So it's certainly a peculiar marriage. It's also possible that she lives in a bubble and that she didn't know there were all these things being said about her and she went down some sort of spiral. You know, she went on a spiral on social media and sort of found all sorts of things and thought, I have to put a stop to this.

E (29:28)

Yeah, I mean, I suppose that that's true. I don't know how she thought that this would put a stop to it rather than having the opposite effect is fueling it. But she certainly seems to have something because she sends out these letters all the time. $1 billion here, $1 billion there. Give me a billion, give me a billion. But that also indicates that she is very aware she is trying to stop something

B (30:02)

she is trying to stop something, and we're not absolutely sure what the something is.

E (30:09)

Right. And she may not be. I mean, I don't. I mean, I think that. I mean, other than her general strategy of saying nothing and ignoring everything, which I think has been a basically savvy strategy, I mean, she's never given any indication that she has a deeper strategic sense of how to deal with. With the press and with potential scandals and with social media.

B (30:44)

Well, she's just dealt with it by becoming even more unknowing. There is, and you have used this word about her, and it's a great word to describe her. Unknowable. She seems unknowable. You watch the documentary of her, and she remains unknowable. You have no idea who her friends are. The only people she talks to are people that are being paid. Her designer, her style stylist, her florist, her event planner. There's nobody around her, actually, that appears to have any real relationship with her. And it's very clear when they focus on her meeting the president and they're going off to do something together, that they're having a conversation as if they haven't spoken to each other for several days. And she's like, have you spoken to Baron? And he's like, yes, he's a cute kid. He's a cute kid. As if he doesn't actually have much to do with him. And then she says, he's very smart. He's very smart. So this is not a couple that, at least according to the documentary, that she chose to put out in the world about herself. She's not suggesting there's any intimacy between her and her husband. And at the end of the inauguration, the evening of the inauguration, the one night you think that perhaps a newly elected president might have conjugal relations with his wife. They very clearly go their own separate ways, as if they've done their duty with each other and now they're separating. He's going off to eat burgers and watch Fox News, and she's going. Who knows where she's going.

E (32:14)

And if your strategy is to be unknowable, then, I mean, it's not exactly a successful step to get out in front of the cameras and then start to announce all kinds of details, which many are checkable, many already seem to be contradicted by. By known evidence. I mean, you have just actually opened the window into asking myriad questions about who you are, what you've been doing, and what the real story is here.

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B (33:27)

So who do you think, if anybody advised her on this strategy?

E (33:35)

You know, I mean, it's hard to say that because we don't know what the strategy is for. We don't know, we don't know what the point of this is. So it's very hard to say who is advising her in any effort to accomplish that point or goal.

B (33:52)

Well, and she may be looking to a life post Trump. She's much younger than her husband. She's 55. He's soon to turn 80. There's a 25 year age gap between. So she must be thinking, what am I going to do after this first lady gig is up? Do I want to go and work in fashion? Do I not want to work at all? Do I want to remarry? She doesn't, you know, so she, she doesn't want to, as you say, go down on the Trump ship if it all ends badly.

E (34:24)

Yeah, no, I can, I mean, obviously can see that. But still, why would you come out and dare the world to challenge the world to link you to Epstein?

B (34:36)

Well, and especially to say that the pictures aren't true and that the pictures are AI because there are plenty of pictures that are previous to AI never been heard of, which show, you know, very clearly Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. And we saw the letters to and from Ghislaine and Melania in the Epstein file. Ghislaine calling her sweet pea, you know, Melania saying, great story about Jeffrey Epstein in New York magazine.

E (35:08)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, certainly. I mean, and, you know, it's, I mean, there's a softness. She's trying to. She's trying to. I mean, this is. Spin this, but spin this in a gauzy way. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time since overlapping in social circles, in common in New York City and Palm Beach. Now, that doesn't sound like at the same time, she's saying, I didn't know Epstein at all. But that certainly doesn't sound like you didn't know Epstein at all.

B (35:42)

Right.

E (35:42)

It sounds like I'm trying to, you know, I'M trying to do a dance to distance myself from. In fact, knowing Epstein, we know that

B (35:54)

Donald and Jeffrey Epstein were friends and fell out somewhere between 2004, 2005, at

E (36:03)

which point, 2004, they started to. I mean, that was the, you know, the moment.

B (36:08)

That was the fight over real estate.

E (36:10)

Exactly.

B (36:10)

Melania had been dating Donald Trump for at least four years at that point. So Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump and Melania overlapped in their relationship history for at least four years.

E (36:27)

Right. 6. 1998, they met, and she says they met in 1998. Although there's a clip of a show since. I've looked at all of this stuff because of this case in which she says they met in 1997. Again, all of this, This is all a murky area. And the only thing that she has accomplished by this statement, it seems to me, is to throw it up, throw it out there and have people pin it down.

B (37:08)

It's really strange. Well, I guess we'll see over the next two or three weeks if anything comes out.

E (37:15)

But let's think of this also in broader terms. The terms that things are going dramatically wrong for Donald Trump at this point.

B (37:25)

This.

E (37:25)

At this point. And they think, and there could be parallel tracks. They're going wrong in the war, they're going wrong from the country, going wrong in terms of heading into the midterms elections. It's quite possible that they're going wrong in terms of his marriage or that all of these things become linked as they do with everyone. When one thing goes wrong, other things go wrong. Goes wrong. And she is now stepping into the middle of this. So what she is doing, and I think we can safely say this, what she has done is not without meaning. It means something. It is to some purpose. What that purpose might be, we don't yet know. But it could very well be the personal in an interfacing of the personal and the political.

B (38:26)

Have we had a president get divorced in the White House? I don't think we have. Have we?

E (38:39)

Well, we can safely say not in the modern. In the. In the modern era, all presidents and first Ladies have endeavored to appear as though they have happy and traditional marriages.

B (38:59)

What a pressure for any couple to survive under that absolutely appalling microscope.

E (39:09)

But, and again, and I think this is really important, I think this is gonna be a theme that we're gonna see more of. She is trying to distance. She is trying to build a separate business. She is trying to come out of this experience, the experience of being the first lady ahead of the game instead of behind the game, which with Donald Trump is always possible.

B (39:35)

Okay. Well, Michael, obviously we'll be paying close attention and we'll be doing exactly the thing that I think the first lady didn't want anybody to do, which is pay much more attention to this matter. And we will look forward to hearing an update from your case. You said you thought there might be an answer any day now.

E (39:54)

Well, that is, I mean that is the other thing to do that is obviously I'm thinking about, but I think it's also very possible that she is thinking about it. There's going to be a decision from a federal judge and one of the things that that judge may allowed to go forward is discovery about exactly where she lives. So. And that will be she doesn't live in Florida, she doesn't live in Washington. She lives in New York City. And that alone could be a big problem for her.

B (40:33)

Okay, Michael, we will be back on Tuesday with another episode of Inside Trump's Head. I think a lot of people will be very glad to have the update on the case. As you say, 25,000 people have contributed to it from small amounts from $5 up to, I'm sure much larger.

E (40:52)

Not too, yeah, there's some hundred dollars but it's really in small amounts.

B (40:58)

Well, I think a lot of people are fed up with the first couple and, and don't want them telling us what we can and can't say. Okay. If you haven't done, please subscribe to the Daily Beast podcast. Wherever you get your podcast, just press the subscription button. So the good news is we have so many bebeast tier members now there are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support. Thanks to our production team. Devon Rogerino, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro, Neil Rosenhaus, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.

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