Meet Mary Trump, the president's niece who is a life coach, apparent Hillary Clinton fan, and has written a scathing tell-all about her uncle
Getty/LinkedIn
President Donald Trump's niece, Mary L. Trump, has written a tell-all book about her uncle. It's scheduled to publish on July 28.
Publisher Simon & Schuster said the book will be a "revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him."
Mary Trump is known to have been on bad terms with her uncle Donald for at least 20 years, when they were involved in a public legal battle against each other. She has largely stayed out of the limelight since.
According to state records she is a registered Democrat, and an unverified Twitter account bearing her name includes tweets supportive of Hillary Clinton.
Members of the Trump family are trying to block the release of her book, but a New York judge recently granted Simon & Schuster permission to release it. However, there is still a temporary injunction on Mary Trump herself.
Here's everything we know about the president's niece, the latest updates about her book, and what she reportedly says in it.
Mary Trump has written a book titled: "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man." It is set to publish on July 28.
Source: Simon & Schuster
She is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr., the president's older brother and once-heir apparent to the Trump family's real-estate business. Her mother is Linda Clapp, a flight attendant whom "Freddy" met while training to be a pilot.
Fred Trump Jr. and Clapp married in 1962, and had two children: Fred Trump III and Mary.
Both Mary and her brother were named after their paternal grandparents, Fred Trump Sr. and his Scottish immigrant wife, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump.
The couple's marriage was short-lived. They divorced in 1970 after eight years of marriage, as Freddy's alcoholism got more and more out of control.
Source: The Washington Post
Freddy died at the age of 42 in 1981 due to complications from alcoholism. He was considered a black sheep of the family for not taking an interest in the family's real-estate business.
Trump Campaign
Source: The Washington Post
When Fred Trump Sr. died in 1999, Mary Trump and her brother contested his will, which left them a substantially smaller inheritance than the other Trump grandchildren.
AP/MediaPunch Standard
The issue at stake was how Fred Sr.'s wealth was dispersed.
Most of his fortune was split between his four surviving children. But Mary and Fred III believed they deserved what would have been their father's share of the inheritance.
Source: New York Daily News
Donald Trump responded by cutting them off the family's medical insurance plan. It was a tough blow for Fred III, who had just welcomed a baby with serious health issues.
—Deborah (@DebErupts) December 26, 2018
Source: New York Daily News
Mary Trump bashed the decision to cut the medical benefits in an interview with the New York Daily News in December 2000, saying her "aunt and uncles should be ashamed of themselves."
Mary Trump was referring to Donald Trump, Robert Trump, and Maryanne Trump Barry, who had been named executors of their father's estate.
Source: New York Daily News
In court documents, Maryanne Trump Barry called Mary and Fred III "absentee grandchildren" who only saw their grandparents on holidays. But in her book, Mary Trump said she "much of her childhood" at her grandparents' house in Queens.
Katie Warren/Business Insider
Source: New York Daily News, Simon & Schuster
Mary and Fred III's inheritance was settled privately in 2000, and Trump told The Washington Post last year that "it worked out well, and we all get along."
In an interview with Axios, published June 21, the president also said he had Mary's brother over to the White House recently.
Source: Washington Post, Business Insider
Sources told The Daily Beast that Mary Trump signed a nondisclosure agreement when that case was settled. Robert Trump, the president's younger brother, is now using the NDA in a lawsuit to stop the book's publication.
Louis Liotta/New York Post Archives /NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty
Source: The Daily Beast, Business Insider, Business Insider
Mary Trump has a master's in English literature from Columbia and a master's and PhD in psychology from Adelphi University. Her publisher says she's "taught graduate courses in trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology."
Source: "Diagnosis: Schizophrenia," Simon & Schuster
A LinkedIn profile which appeared to belong to Mary said she worked as a life coach. It has now been taken down.
New York State Board of Elections records show that Mary Trump is a registered Democrat, and an unverified Twitter account bearing her name includes tweets supportive of Hillary Clinton.
AP Photo/David Goldman
—Mary L Trump (@MaryLTrump) November 9, 2016
The Twitter account was active on the night Trump was elected to president. One tweet said it was "one of the worst nights of my life," and another said "the American experiment has failed."
Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty
—Mary L Trump (@MaryLTrump) November 9, 2016
—Mary L Trump (@MaryLTrump) November 9, 2016
—Mary L Trump (@MaryLTrump) November 9, 2016
Mary Trump currently lives in New York with her daughter, according to Simon & Schuster. Her book will be a "revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him," the publisher said.
Jennifer S. Altman/For The Washington Post via Getty
Source: Simon & Schuster
In the book, Mary Trump will reportedly out herself as the primary source for a 2018 New York Times exposé on the president's finances, and blame her uncle and grandfather for failing to help her father in his time of need.
The Times' report found that the president was not a self-made man, as he had continuously claimed, but used more than $400 million of his father's fortune to prop up his own businesses when they were struggling, through shady tax schemes.
According to The Daily Beast, Mary Trump will say in the book that she provided The Times with tax documents and confidential family documents. The Times has declined to respond to her claim.
Among the details to be revealed in the book is also how the president mocked his father when he started to succumb to Alzheimer's in the 1990s.
Source: Simon & Schuster, Business Insider
The president broke his silence on the book in an interview with Axios, published June 21. He said that his niece isn't allowed to publish the book because she signed a "very powerful" NDA when she and her brother settled their lawsuit.
Source: Axios, Business Insider
On June 26, the president's younger brother, Robert Trump, filed a lawsuit trying to prevent the publishing of Mary Trump's book, saying it violated the NDA she signed back in 2001.
Source: Poughkeepsie Journal
In response to the lawsuit, a judge in Dutchess County, New York, signed off on a temporary restraining order against Mary Trump and her publisher, barring them from publishing the book.
Nick Agro/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Robert Trump is being represented by celebrity attorney Charles Harder, pictured above in 2018.
Source: Business Insider
But an appeals-court judge quickly overturned part of the restraining order on July 1, saying it couldn't be applied to Simon & Schuster because the publisher had not signed an NDA with the Trumps.
Google Street View
Simon & Schuster also said it didn't know about the NDA when it commissioned the book.
Source: Politico
However, it's unclear whether it can publish the book without consequences, since the temporary injunction still bars Mary Trump and "any agent" of hers from publishing the book.
Google Street View
A statement from the publishing house did not address whether it would publish the book even if the injunction was not dropped against Mary Trump.
"We support Mary L. Trump's right to tell her story in 'Too Much and Never Enough,' a work of great interest and importance to the national discourse that fully deserves to be published for the benefit of the American public," Simon & Schuster spokesman Adam Rothberg said in a statement to Politico.
"As all know, there are well-established precedents against prior restraint and pre-publication injunctions, and we remain confident that the preliminary injunction will be denied."
Mary Trump filed an affidavit on July 2 seeking to get the injunction dropped in full. She argued that her uncle and his siblings had already violated their agreement — thus making it null and void.
The court filing was the first time Mary Trump has publicly addressed her book.
In the document, she said that the 2018 New York Times story on Trump proves that he lied about the assets in her grandfather's estate, and that she never would have signed the agreement had she known their true value.
She also said that her uncles Donald and Robert had spoken publicly about the settlement "on numerous occasions," which means they already violated the agreement to secrecy.
Mary Trump also said she "never believed" the agreement would prevent her from writing a book about "the conduct and character of my uncle, the sitting President of the United States, during his campaign for reelection."
You can read the court filing here.
A judge has yet to rule on Mary Trump's latest request, so the book's future remains up in the air. Meanwhile, it remains one of Amazon's top sellers, thanks to the multiple preorders for her book.
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