(RoyalPatriot.com )- The niece of former President Donald Trump is seeking to revive the lawsuit she has filed against her uncle, which alleges that he cheated her out of her family’s fortune.
The lawsuit filed by Mary Trump was dismissed in November, after a judge ruled she “unambiguously” waived her right to file a lawsuit when she signed a family settlement agreement back in 2001 that allowed her to cash out her inheritance.
This Monday, though, she filed a motion that argues that when she signed that agreement, she did so under duress. In the filing, Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer for Mary Trump, wrote:
“A release from claims is only valid under New York law if it was ‘fairly and knowingly made.'”
Bloomberg reported that the settlement with the Trump family, by contrast, was ultimately achieved by coercing Mary Trump, which included threatening to swamp her with high tax payments that she wouldn’t be able to afford, as well as discontinuing the health insurance for her nephew.
In the brief, Kaplan wrote that the former president along with his siblings, Maryanne Trump Barry and the late Robert Trump, “placed young Mary in profoundly unfair circumstances, not only by threatening to bankrupt her” and also “by terminating the health insurance that was literally keeping her newborn nephew alive in an intensive care unit.”
In the lawsuit that was thrown out in November, Mary Trump alleged she was defrauded of millions of dollars that are due to her.
She originally filed a lawsuit against three Trump family members — Donald, his sister Maryanne and the executor of Robert’s estate. In it, Mary alleged that “they designed and carried out a complex scheme to siphon funds away from her interests, conceal their grift and deceive her about the truth value of what she had inherited.”
While Mary signed the family settlement back in 2001, she said that the full scene of the fraud she’s alleging only came to light in 2018, after The New York Times published a piece, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Scheme as He Reaped Riches From His Father.” That article won the Pulitzer Price that year, and Mary provided reporters in that case with 19 boxes of documents she obtained during that 2001 settlement.
Mary Trump appealed the November ruling by the judge in New York. In that appeal, her lawyers said that the state Supreme Court judge in New York made multiple errors, which included misapplying the law as well as “misconstruing” the 2001 settlement’s terms.
The appeal filing stated:
“The Supreme Court erred by misstating and/or misapplying the applicable legal standard requiring that a release have been knowingly and fairly made in order to later be enforced with respect to claims that were unknown at the time of the release, including fraud claims.”
Ever since the lawsuit was filed, both legal teams have sparred in court over whether the lawsuit should be able to move forward in the first place.
