Mary Trump, niece of U.S. President Donald Trump, will be allowed to promote her new tell-all family memoir after a New York Supreme Court judge lifted a temporary injunction against her. File Photo by Oliver Contreras/UPI |
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July 13 (UPI) -- A New York Supreme Court judge on Monday lifted a restraining order on presidential niece Mary Trump that would have prohibited her from publicizing her new book about her uncle U.S. President Donald Trump and his family.
The president's brother, Robert Trump, had gone to court seeking to stop Mary Trump from publishing her family memoir Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, which will be released on Tuesday. Robert Trump claimed Mary Trump was bound by a confidentiality agreement signed as part of an inheritance settlement from her grandfather in 2001.
Judge Hal Greenwald ruled that the confidentiality clause in "what appeared to be somewhat nasty [intrafamily] litigation" was "so overly broad, as to be ineffective."
Greenwald also referred to a federal court ruling which stopped the Justice Department from blocking the publication of John Bolton's book The Room Where it Happened, also published by Simon and Schuster.
"To quote United States v. Bolton ... 'By the looks of it the horse is not just out of the barn, it is out of the country,'" Greenwald wrote.
Mary Trump's lawyer, Theodore Boutrous Jr. said in a statement, "The court got it right in rejecting the Trump family's effort to squelch Mary Trump's core political speech on important issues of public concern. The First Amendment forbids prior restraints because they are intolerable infringements on the right to participate in democracy. Tomorrow, the American public will be able to read Mary's important words for themselves."
Simon and Schuster, the book's publisher, also obtained a ruling from a New York State appellate judge to proceed with the publication of the book because the publisher was not a party to the settlement agreement.
According to the publisher, the tell-all book will seek to describe "the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world's health, economic security and social fabric."
"Today, Donald is much as he was at 3 years old: incapable of growing, learning or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information," says the back cover of her book.
Mary Trump is the daughter of Donald Trump's brother Fred Trump Jr.
In the book, she alleges that Donald Trump paid someone else to take standardized tests to attend Wharton business school at University of Pennsylvania, according to reviews.
"Donald's ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father's money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself," she wrote.
Mary Trump also identifies herself as the person who leaked Trump's financial records to The New York Times.
The White House said Mary Trump's work was a "book of falsehoods."
