Trump Brother Was in ICU Just Before Filing Suit Over Tell-All
Robert Trump, Donald’s younger brother, spent at least 10 days in an intensive care unit before being released this week and launching legal action to try and stop the publication of his niece’s explosive tell-all book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.
Robert, 72, had been at Mount Sinai hospital’s neurosciences intensive care unit (NSICU) in New York since at least June 11th, being treated for a serious condition. He was discharged on Sunday and, despite his stay in the hospital, he wasted no time in filing and signing complicated legal documents aided by his celebrity attorney Charles Harder and releasing a statement.
“Her attempt to sensationalize and mischaracterize our family relationship after all of these years for her own financial gain is both a travesty and injustice to the memory of my late brother, Fred, and our beloved parents. I and the rest of my entire family are so proud of my wonderful brother, the president, and feel that Mary’s actions are truly a disgrace,” Robert said in his statement to The New York Times roughly 48 hours after he was discharged from hospital.
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On its website Mount Sinai boasts that its 16-bed NSICU specializes in “state of the art, compassionate care of patients who suffer from subarachnoid hemorrhage, acute ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, subdural hematomas, coma, tumors of the brain and spine, severe or prolonged seizures, neuro-infections, [and] spinal cord injury among others.”
Robert did not respond to multiple requests for comment Wednesday and his attorney, Harder, declined to comment.
Mary Trump’s high-powered legal team, which includes the renowned First Amendment attorney Theodore Boutrous of the law firm Gibson Dunn, are expected to file their response in the coming days.
Part of their argument in Mary’s defense will be that the settlement agreement—signed by all parties in 2001 and included in Harder’s Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) filing—contains confidentiality clauses that are in effect “double facing,” meaning that as well as muzzling Mary from speaking publicly it also was meant to have silenced Donald, Robert and their sister Maryanne Trump.
The president, the argument goes, has himself violated the confidentiality agreement by publicly discussing his niece and her book, which is currently slated for a July 28th release, in an interview at the White House last week.
“She’s not allowed to write a book. You know, when we settled with her and her brother, who I do have a good relationship with—she’s got a brother, Fred, who I do have a good relationship with, but when we settled, she has a total... signed a nondisclosure,” Trump told the website Axios on Friday, in regards to Mary’s tell-all.
The volley of threats all come during the latest stage of the dynastic drama and brewing legal struggle threatening to consume the Trump family, even as Donald J. Trump continues his fight this year to keep the White House from falling into Democratic hands.
Even before the president’s brother—represented by Harder, one of President Trump’s personal attorneys and the Gawker-killing lawyer—filed the order against Mary in Queens County Surrogate’s court this week, Trump had actively weighed his options for legal retribution against his own niece. After he was caught off-guard by the news of the upcoming “tell-all,” he vented aloud in the White House that she’d signed an NDA, as The Daily Beast first reported.
White House spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment on this story. A rep for Simon & Schuster declined to comment.
And it’s not just Mary who has to deal with Trumpworld’s legal threats and court battles. Trump administration attorneys and his outside counsel have been hard at work this election year—one already plagued by a destroyed American economy, a mass protest movement in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, and a coronavirus pandemic that’s claimed a U.S. death toll upwards of 100,000—as the president goes to war against new books and manuscripts penned by his foes, including his former National Security Adviser John Bolton and his former longtime fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen.
President Trump’s lawyers are also seeking to uphold other longstanding NDAs. For years, Jessica Denson, a former Hispanic outreach coordinator for the 2016 Trump campaign, has been working her way through the courts in her efforts to invalidate not just her own Trump NDA, but all NDAs that the Trump campaign had staff sign. “All of our employees sign a non-disclosure agreement,” Michael Glassner, chief operating officer for Trump’s 2020 campaign, told The Daily Beast in a statement last year.
In court papers, Denson and her lawyers argue that the agreements that Team Trump forced on them were unlawful and failed to allow staffers to make claims regarding workplace discrimination.
“President Trump is clearly NDA-happy,” David Bowles, one of Denson’s attorneys, said on Wednesday evening. “He has used NDAs to suppress his supporters and former supporters, and invalidating those NDAs is the point of our current class action. Now he’s trying to suppress his own family members using an NDA. All of this is intended to quash the criticism that is at the heart of a vibrant democracy.”
Denson added, “I am not willing to be one of the many who Trump has abused, or to be used as a tool for him to abuse the American people and presidency, and that is why I am fighting to invalidate his dastardly NDAs.”
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