Daily Mail to Pay Melania Trump $3 Million

The Daily Mail newspaper in the UK agreed to damages and costs to pay the U.S. first lady Melania Trump over an article it published about her career in modeling.

The UK daily published allegations that the current first lady, at one time had worked as an escort. The article was later retracted. The newspaper published the story during the presidential election campaign in the United States last year.

Melania Trump accepted the damages as well as an apology from the Daily Mail in London’s High Court. Trump filed a lawsuit this past February seeking $150 million in damages. The amount she accepted was not disclosed by the court.

However, sources have reported that the settlement reached was for an amount said to be less than $3 million, including damages and legal costs.

In the apology it gave to Trump, the British newspaper acknowledged it published allegations that Melania Trump has provided services that went beyond those of just modeling.

The apology continued by saying that the newspaper accepted that the allegations they published about the U.S. first lady were not true.

One of the attorneys representing Trump told the court in London that the allegations had struck at the heart of the plaintiff’s personal dignity and integrity.

The lawsuit filed by the first lady initially had said that she had a once-in-a-lifetime, unique opportunity to start a commercial brand that was broad-based in a number of product categories, of which each could have received multi-million dollar relationships for a term of many years during a time she is one of the women most photographed in the entire world.

However, critics used that phrasing to question if Trump was planning to receive financial gains through her current position as first lady.

The second filing of the suit, which was re-filed a few weeks later, omitted the controversial phrase.

Trump was born in the small town of Sevnica about an hour from the Slovenia capital of Ljubljana. Her birth name is Melanija Knavs.

She signed her first modeling contract with an agency while still in her teens, and starting flying across Europe and to the United States appearing in ad campaigns featuring high-profile products.

In 1998, at the age of 28, she first met Donald Trump during New York Fashion week. The two married 7 years later.