A federal judge on May 22, 2026, threw out author Michael Wolff’s preemptive lawsuit against First Lady Melania Trump, ending a high-stakes legal gambit that threatened to crack open one of Washington’s most carefully guarded subjects: the actual nature of the Trump marriage.
Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a President Donald Trump appointee sitting in federal court in Manhattan, used a 45-page ruling to scold Wolff for what she described as “textbook bad-faith forum shopping,” dismissing his anti-SLAPP lawsuit as a “contorted” attempt to short-circuit a $1 billion defamation threat from the first lady herself. The decision deprives Wolff of the subpoena power he had hoped to wield against the Trumps over their long-documented social ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein.
It also short-circuits, at least for now, what was shaping up to be the most aggressive public excavation yet of a marriage that critics, biographers and tabloid sleuths have long described as something closer to a corporate arrangement than a romance.
A Lawsuit Built on a Threat
Wolff, who has written four books about President Trump, filed his complaint in October 2025 after Melania Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, sent him a letter warning that she would be “left with no alternative” but to sue if he did not retract statements her lawyer claimed had inflicted “overwhelming reputational and financial harm.” Wolff had told interviewers that Donald Trump first slept with Melania on Epstein’s private jet — a claim that placed the first lady inside Epstein’s social orbit without alleging she took part in his crimes.
Rather than wait to be sued, Wolff went first. He filed in New York state court under the state’s anti-SLAPP statute, asking a judge to declare in advance that his statements were not defamatory. Brito then had the case transferred to federal court and moved to dismiss it or shift it to a federal court in Florida, where Melania Trump’s separate defamation suit is pending.
Vyskocil agreed that the two “have a real dispute,” but ruled that “they must litigate it according to the same procedures as everyone else.” The judge said federal court had jurisdiction but declined to exercise it, dismissing the case “to be litigated like any other.”
“Plaintiff asks for a declaration that, if the first lady sues him, he deserves to win,” Vyskocil wrote. “That is not how the federal courts work.”
Epstein, Maxwell and a White House Denial
The ruling lands at a delicate moment for the first lady’s carefully managed public image. In April 2026, Melania Trump made a rare on-camera statement at the White House to deny any affiliation with Epstein, the financier who killed himself in a Manhattan jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The address came after she was revealed in Justice Department files to have had communications connected to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted accomplice.
“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” she said, reading from prepared remarks and dismissing what she called “unfounded and baseless lies.” She insisted that overlapping social circles in New York City and Palm Beach, Florida, explained any photographs or anecdotes placing her near Epstein.
The Epstein scandal has been a persistent irritant for the president since he reclaimed the White House on January 20, 2025, with the administration’s handling of the case files drawing scrutiny from across the political spectrum. Wolff, who interviewed Epstein extensively before the financier’s death and was himself revealed in Justice Department files to have had extensive communications with him, had signaled that discovery in his case could probe the Trumps’ ties to Epstein directly.
The Marriage Question Won’t Go Away
Buried inside Wolff’s filings was a claim with implications well beyond Epstein: that the lawsuit could have exposed where Melania actually lives, alleging she does not reside with Donald Trump in Washington or at Mar-a-Lago. The assertion fed directly into a years-long parlor game in political media — the question of whether the Trump marriage is, as one description in the case put it, a “sham marriage, trophy marriage” maintained for political utility.
Wolff cast his lawsuit in sweeping First Amendment terms, accusing the Trump family of creating “a climate of fear in the nation so that people cannot freely or confidently exercise their First Amendment rights.” He alleged the Trumps and their allies use costly litigation to extract “North Korean-style confessions and apologies” from critics. Vyskocil was unmoved, calling the filing an exercise in “tactical gamesmanship” and writing that the court “will not be conscripted to oversee an abusively presented spat.”
Nick Clemens, a spokesperson for the first lady, said in a statement that Melania Trump “is proud to continue standing up to, and fighting against, those who spread malicious and defamatory falsehoods as they desperately try to get undeserved attention and money from their unlawful conduct.”
The dismissal clears the runway for Melania Trump’s separate billion-dollar defamation suit in Florida to proceed without Wolff’s preemptive shield. But it leaves the underlying questions — about Epstein, about the first lady’s whereabouts, about the architecture of one of the most scrutinized marriages in American public life — exactly where they were before the gavel fell: unresolved and circling.
