Melania Trump: Telegraph apologises and pays damages
Published on: January 25, 2019
The Daily Telegraph has apologised “unreservedly” to Melania Trump and agreed to pay her “substantial damages” for an article it published last week.
The paper said its Saturday Magazine cover story “The Mystery of Melania” contained a number of false statements.
These included claims the US First Lady was struggling in her modelling career before she met her husband and that she cried on election night, it said.
The paper accepted the statements should not have been published.
It said it would also pay Mrs Trump’s legal costs
In an apology printed on Saturday, the paper accepted Mrs Trump was “a successful professional model in her own right before she met her husband and obtained her own modelling work without his assistance”.
It said the article also wrongly claimed that Mrs Trump’s mother, father and sister relocated to New York in 2005 to live in buildings owned by Donald Trump.
The paper added that Mrs Trump’s father was not “a fearsome presence” and “did not control the family”, as alleged in the article.
It also accepted that Mrs Trump did not leave her design and architecture course at university for reasons relating to the completion of an exam but because she wanted to pursue a successful career as a professional model.