According to his niece, Donald Trump excels in a specific area: covering up his crimes.
On Friday, Mary Trump asked a judge to let her multi-million dollar lawsuit against the former president move forward. Mary Trump claims her uncle and two of his siblings, Maryanne Trump Barry and the recently deceased Robert Trump, used false documents and bogus loans to cheat her out of her full inheritance. But the defendants assert that the statute of limitations on the fraud charges renders the suit invalid.
In their court filing on Friday, Mary Trump’s lawyers argue, “The offensiveness of defendants’ past conduct — stealing tens of millions of dollars from their own niece — is perhaps surpassed only by the chutzpah of their current arguments for dismissal.”
Mary Trump, a psychologist and author who wrote a damning tell-all book about the family last year, argues she didn’t discover the alleged decades-old scheme until October 2018, when the New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning report on Donald Trump’s finances. The documents handed over to Mary Trump in earlier legal matters were either unrelated to the alleged fraud or contained false information that couldn’t have tipped her off, she said.
The Trump siblings “cannot avoid accountability for their fraud simply because they thought that they had gotten away with it years ago,” Mary Trump’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said in Friday’s filing.
Donald Trump’s lawyers have accused Mary Trump of waging an embittered and greedy campaign against her family.
Mary’s father, Fred Trump Jr, passed away in 1981. He left his then-16 year-old daughter a profitable real estate portfolio.
Mary Trump said her aunt and uncles were supposed to look after her interests but instead siphoned money away, and finally “squeezed” her out of the family fortune in a 2001 settlement related to the estate of Fred Trump Sr, who died in 1999.
Earlier this week, the Manhattan D.A.’s office received millions of pages of documents pertaining to their investigation into the former president’s financial dealings.