The eye of the storm may be in Washington, but the tempest of President Trump’s second term reaches the farthest corners of the world, including East Hampton Town, where one sharp-eyed and long-term observer is proving a thorn in the collective side of not only the president but the first lady.
Melania Trump recently threatened to sue the author and journalist Michael Wolff for, in Trumpian fashion, $1 billion if he did not retract and apologize for statements linking her to the late financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which she asserts are false and defamatory. Ms. Trump referred to an article based on “Trump’s Epstein Scandal Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” an episode of The Daily Beast’s “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast, which Mr. Wolff co-hosts. The Daily Beast retracted the article, according to the online publication, following a complaint from Ms. Trump. The article, it wrote, did “not meet our standards and has therefore been removed from our platforms.”
Mr. Wolff, who with his family moved from Manhattan to Amagansett during the Covid-19 pandemic, responded to that threat with an actual lawsuit filed last month in New York State Supreme Court accusing Ms. Trump of trying to stifle his inquiry into Epstein. He is seeking damages and a judgment that he has not defamed Ms. Trump.
The president has long employed litigation tactics described as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, aimed at silencing critics and forcing time-consuming and expensive legal procedures. New York’s anti-SLAPP law, which Mr. Wolff is using to counter Ms. Trump’s threatened legal action, protects against meritless lawsuits intended to suppress free speech on matters of public interest. The law was strengthened in 2020.
Epstein, who allegedly died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, was a longtime friend of the president. As a veteran journalist, Mr. Wolff has long known Mr. Trump. He knew Epstein as well. In “Howl,” his Substack newsletter, he recently reprinted his article “The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein,” featured in his 2022 book “Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned.”
As the podcast episode’s title suggests, the president’s association with Epstein, a convicted sex offender, is a controversy that seemingly will not fade. Attorney General Pam Bondi fueled greater suspicion among the public by repeatedly implying that she would oversee the release of potentially new documents related to Epstein, then issuing a “first phase” of documents that largely contained information already made public, and finally announcing that no further disclosure was warranted. Separately, The Wall Street Journal reported that Ms. Bondi and her deputy informed Mr. Trump in May that his name appeared multiple times in the government’s files on Epstein.
“In fact, the statements that I had made about her were mild, to say the least,” Mr. Wolff said of Ms. Trump. “Certainly not defamatory, merely confirming what many photographs had shown.”
Where multiple media organizations “have capitulated” to Mr. Trump’s threats, he said, “we just took the logical step. A step that no one has yet taken, but nevertheless, the logical step.” Ms. Trump’s legal representatives have yet to respond, he said. “And it puts them in an awkward position, because now I have subpoena power. I can call her, I can ask her things. I can delve into this relationship, which is obviously her relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, but also, more to the point, Donald Trump’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. And obviously, that’s an issue of national significance.”
Mr. Trump “would call me up on a fairly regular basis,” Mr. Wolff recalled of his time as a media columnist for New York magazine in the 1990s, often to complain about his portrayal, or because he wasn’t portrayed at all. But “we got along fine. I mean, he was jocular and amusing, and then I would report to other people and everybody would have a laugh.”
During Mr. Trump’s first campaign for the presidency, Mr. Wolff was writing for The Hollywood Reporter, and the two became better acquainted. After his election, Mr. Wolff visited the president-elect at Trump Tower in Manhattan, seeking approval to observe the first 100 days of the new administration from the White House. “I was there for about seven months,” he said. From that experience, he wrote “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” published in 2018.
He met Epstein a few times as a New York magazine columnist, Mr. Wolff said, and some years after his 2008 incarceration on a prostitution charge, Epstein contacted Mr. Wolff. “He was looking for someone to write about him.” Mr. Wolff declined, but Epstein nonetheless invited him to his residence. “I’m a journalist in New York,” he said. “You get called and told ‘Bill Gates is going to be here,’ you go.”
“I didn’t commit to doing anything, but I was listening,” Mr. Wolff said. When Mr. Trump launched his presidential bid in 2015, “it quickly became clear that [Epstein] was a wealth of information about Trump, and we started to plumb his relationship.” Epstein became “an important source for me in understanding Trump.”
“The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein” chronicles a bizarre effort to humanize the disgraced financier undertaken by a team including the onetime Trump administration strategist Steve Bannon and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Epstein’s seeming disinterest in the proceedings, and, finally, his inexplicable return to the United States from Paris, at which time he was jailed. “A month later, he’s dead,” Mr. Wolff said.
“The story then continued on in a way that has, I would say unexpectedly, stuck to Trump,” Mr. Wolff said. “I think it’s unexpected for Trump also. He can’t get rid of this story. And as it turns out, I become one of the people who . . . has a greater background in this story than most others.” This, he said, “has left me in a kind of curious position as the writer who knows more than other people.”
Mr. Trump and Epstein “were the closest of friends for more than a decade,” Mr. Wolff said. “They were deeply involved in each other’s social lives, sexual lives, between Palm Beach and New York, on each other’s airplanes.” Subsequently, Epstein has become “the monster of the age,” he said. “So it is, to say the least, awkward that Trump was as close to this as he was. . . . Their pursuit was of women, in particular models — supermodels, runway models, catalog models, girls who just dreamed of being models. . . . And I don’t think the ages of these women — girls — mattered to them.”
One problem an autocrat faces, Mr. Wolff said, “is that you break so many rules and make so many enemies that you can’t leave power, because if you leave power, then you’ll be held accountable for these things. The only way to avoid that is not to leave power.”
It is “obviously scary” to be threatened with a billion-dollar lawsuit, he said. “I’ve been doing this a very, very long time, and never has it crossed my mind that this, in this country, would be one of the things that might happen.”