Melania Trump has been a target of the liberal media since the day her husband rode down that escalator.
She decided to fight back after a liberal journalist pushed a false narrative.
And a federal judge smacked down one of the most vicious lies ever told about Melania Trump.
The Daily Beast Published the Epstein Lie Against Melania Trump and Then Quietly Disappeared It
Michael Wolff is the author of Fire and Fury — the anti-Trump hit book the liberal media treated as gospel in 2018.
He has spent nearly a decade turning anti-Trump gossip into bestsellers for the liberal media machine.
In mid-2025, Wolff went on Inside Trump's Head — a podcast he co-hosts with Daily Beast chief content officer Joanna Coles — and claimed Melania Trump was "very involved" in the Trump family's relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The Daily Beast ran the story, then deleted it entirely and issued an apology admitting it did not meet editorial standards.
That should have been the end of it.
Wolff kept making the claims anyway.
In October 2025, Melania Trump's legal team sent him a pre-action notice demanding a retraction and apology or face a $1 billion defamation lawsuit.
Wolff filed his own preemptive lawsuit in New York state court.
He cast himself as a free speech martyr fighting Trump family intimidation.
Then he started raising money off it.
Court documents filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York show Wolff and his counsel raised more than $836,000 while the legal battle played out.
A federal lawsuit was his fundraising vehicle.
A Federal Judge Threw Out the Wolff Lawsuit and Called It What It Was
In May, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil dismissed Wolff's lawsuit and called his legal strategy a "textbook bad-faith forum-shopping" effort and an "abuse of the Declaratory Judgment Act."
Wolff had filed before Melania ever sued him — a preemptive strike to lock in a favorable ruling she hadn't yet had the chance to challenge.
Vyskocil also blasted Wolff for an "inappropriate level of tactical gamesmanship" and said she "will not be conscripted to oversee an abusively presented spat."
A federal judge put it in writing, in the official record — a self-described press freedom champion played games with the federal court system to smear the First Lady of the United States.
Melania's legal team is now arguing that games have a price.
Her attorneys, led by Caryn Schechtman of DLA Piper and Alejandro Brito, contend Wolff broke Rule 11 — the federal bar against filing claims without evidentiary support — along with a statute that lets judges sanction lawyers who deliberately drag out proceedings.
"Plaintiff and his counsel asserted a legally frivolous claim, propped it up with factual contentions that lacked any evidentiary support, and used them to run a political and commercial campaign," the motion states.
"They should pay for Mrs. Trump's fees and expenses incurred for the process they abused."
Wolff has faced accusations of fabricating facts for commercial gain going back to the 1990s.
After his 1998 book Burn Rate, a trade publication documented that 13 people accused Wolff of having "invented or changed quotes."
His 2018 book Fire and Fury — the one that made him a liberal media darling — contained errors its own author acknowledged.
Wolff admitted in the introduction that some accounts "are in conflict with one another" and that he "settled on a version of events" he thought were true.
When pressed on a specific inaccuracy, he conceded: "Sometimes the sources get it a little off."
The pattern runs the same way every time — throw out the claim and collect the money, then apologize quietly if forced to.
Melania Trump has had enough of the pattern.
"The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today," she said in April.
"The individuals lying about me are devoid of ethical standards, humility and respect."
The Man Who Raised $836,000 Off a Fraudulent Epstein Lawsuit Just Called Melania Trump Preposterous
Wolff has called the sanctions motion "preposterous."
The judge who already called his lawsuit a bad-faith abuse of the courts will decide what preposterous actually looks like.
The liberal media spent a decade telling conservatives that Melania was fair game — that the First Lady of the United States could be tied to a pedophile without evidence and without consequence.
A federal judge just started writing the consequences down.
Sources:
- Misty Severi, "Melania Trump files for sanctions against Michael Wolff over Epstein-linked allegations he made," Just the News, July 22, 2026.
- "First lady Melania Trump files motion for sanctions against Michael Wolff over tossed lawsuit," Fox News, July 22, 2026.
- "Melania Trump files for sanctions against journalist Michael Wolff," Courthouse News Service, July 22, 2026.
