A judge has freed Mary Trump from a gag order, allowing the president’s niece to speak freely about her family and promote her hotly anticipated tell-all.
The book—Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which people close to the project say has already sold close to 1 million copies and is on its third print run—is due out on Tuesday.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Mary Trump’s attorney, Theodore Boutrous Jr., said, “The court got it right in rejecting the Trump family’s effort to squelch Mary Trump’s core political speech on important issues of public concern. The First Amendment forbids prior restraints because they are intolerable infringements on the right to participate in democracy. Tomorrow, the American public will be able to read Mary’s important words for themselves.”
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The development comes as the man spearheading the complicated and time consuming legal effort to stop the book’s publication and enforce Mary’s gag order, her uncle Robert, was readmitted to the same intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on Thursday where he had spent 10 days in June in a serious condition, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.
By Monday afternoon, the president’s younger brother was said to be “resting” after being moved from the neurological intensive care unit (NSICU) to the hospital’s neurosurgical care unit (NSCU). His celebrity attorney, Charles Harder, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
As The Daily Beast first reported, less than 48 hours after getting out of the hospital’s NSICU in New York, Robert, 72, launched legal action to try and stop the publication of his niece’s explosive tell-all book.
Dutchess County Supreme Court Judge Hal Greenwald accused Robert of making an “attempt to misinterpret the agreement” that settled the estate of family patriarch Fred Trump Sr., with his claim that it forbade Mary Trump from publishing any account of the family’s internecine dramas. He criticized the language of the settlement for a lack of clarity.
Perhaps more significantly, Greenwald slapped down the elder Trump’s assertion that the agreement barred publisher Simon & Schuster from printing and distributing the book. The judge noted that Simon & Schuster was neither a signatory to the settlement agreement, nor “an agent of Mary L. Trump.” He found Harder’s arguments that the company knew of constraints on the scion’s ability to publish a memoir unconvincing.
“Plaintiff has not demonstrated any impropriety on behalf of S&S in obtaining the publishing rights to Mary L. Trump’s memoir or that S&S did not lawfully obtain the information,” Greenwald wrote. “Plaintiff fails to provide proof sufficient to show that there is an agent-principal relationship between S&S and Mary L. Trump, or that S&S was acting in concert with Mary L. Trump to breach the agreement.”
Further, the jurist seemed to scoff at the suggestion that the elder Trump would suffer “irreparable harm” with the book’s publication. He noted that a court recently refused to seize copies of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s book, which contained “information pertaining to national security, not 20-year-old family history.”
By contrast, Greenwald pointed out that Simon & Schuster—if forced to cancel or delay the release—would lose millions, and the American people would lose access to a vital source of information about their commander-in-chief. Greenwald seemed to acknowledge that the president might suffer irreparable harm from the book’s publication, but it was his less prominent and powerful brother who brought the suit.
“At this juncture, when there has been heightened media attention from all sources and multiple comments made by a variety of Trump family members about the agreement, it may be moot to enjoin publication and dissemination of Trump family laundry,” he wrote. “The real possibility here is for S&S and the public to be irreparably harmed if the book was enjoined.”
Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, said in a statement, “We are delighted that the Court has denied the plaintiff’s request for preliminary injunction, and vacated the Temporary Restraining Order against our author, Mary L. Trump.
“The unfettered right to publish is a sacred American freedom and a founding principle of our republic, and we applaud the Court for affirming well-established precedents against prior restraint and pre-publication injunctions. Too Much and Never Enough is a work of great significance, with very real implications for our national discourse, and we look forward to bringing it to a public that is clearly eager to read it.”
