As part of an ongoing court fight involving ex-President Donald Trump, two of his siblings, and his niece Mary, the former commander-in-chief is now facing allegations of fraudulently blocking access to tens of millions of dollars worth of family assets from his niece. Mary Trump, who is the daughter of the former president’s late brother Fred and released a book revealing Trump family secrets, alleges that Donald, Robert, and Maryanne Trump Barry “conspired to skim tens of millions of dollars off her stake in the family business for decades after her father died and left them as her fiduciaries,” as summarized by Bloomberg.
On Friday, Mary Trump formally asked a New York judge to deny Donald’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit that she filed late last year over the alleged scheme to push her out of family finances. As Bloomberg put it, Mary “is balking at the former president’s claim that she waited too long to file her multi-million dollar fraud suit against him, saying she would have sued sooner if he hadn’t covered his tracks so well.”
Donald’s side claims that Mary’s lawsuit is past the statute of limitations for fraud cases in New York, which limits cases to less than two years out from the initial discovery or reasonably potential discovery of the alleged fraud, but Mary “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,” Bloomberg explains. Thus, according to that timetable of Mary’s discovery of the alleged family financial fraud, her suit fell within the statute of limitations.
Mary Trump’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan insisted in Friday’s filing that Donald and his siblings “cannot avoid accountability for their fraud simply because they thought that they had gotten away with it years ago.” Mary’s side added as follows:
‘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.’
In the past, Donald himself has publicly spoken out against Mary, who he once described as a “mess.” In her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Mary described Donald’s father, Fred Sr., as a “high-functioning sociopath.”
