6 Lawsuits Donald Trump Is Going To Have To Deal With When He Leaves Office

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Atlantic, Nov 11, 2020.

  1. Atlantic

    Atlantic

  2. Bugenhagen

    Bugenhagen

    I had not heard of this one :

    6) Mary Trump's lawsuit. The niece of the President -- and the author of the scathing bestseller "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man" -- sued Trump in September, alleging that he, his sister and his late brother had committed fraud to keep her from getting her fair share of the estate of Trump's father, Fred Sr.

    Mary Trump was 16 years old at the time of her father's death in 1981, and she and her brother, Fred Trump III, inherited minority interests in his vast real-estate holdings.

    Because Mary was a teenager, the lawsuit says, a lawyer named Irwin Durben, who had been Trump Sr.'s attorney and an executive at Trump-related entities, was appointed to act as a trustee on her behalf.

    But, according to the lawsuit, Durben, who died in 2016, was "irredeemably conflicted," siding with Mary's family members over her own interests, "and ultimately acquiesced in Defendants' campaign to squeeze her out of the family business entirely."

    By the 1990s, with Trump Sr. suffering from Alzheimer's, Mary Trump's lawsuit alleges, his sons Donald and Robert and his daughter Maryanne at first competed with each other, "with palace intrigue reminiscent of the HBO series Succession," but then worked together to advance their interests to the detriment of others.

    In 1991, Donald secretly approached Durben, according to the lawsuit, to get him to draft a codicil to give Donald complete control of his father's estate, the lawsuit says. After his father rejected the codicil, Maryanne "finished the job," securing a revised will that named her, Donald and Robert the executors of their father's estate.

    According to Mary, they then devised and perpetrated three schemes.

    In the first, according to the lawsuit, they allegedly siphoned value from her interests to entities they owned while portraying the transactions as legitimate business.

    In the second, the lawsuit says, they allegedly depressed the value of her interests using fraudulent appraisals and financial statements.

    And in the third, they allegedly pressured her into signing a settlement by threatening to bankrupt her interests and canceling the healthcare policy for her brother's infant son, who was suffering from seizures and was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy, according to the suit.

    In addition to alleging the elder Trumps committed fraud, Mary Trump's lawsuit accuses them of breaching their fiduciary duty and committing negligent misrepresentation.
    "Through each of these schemes," the lawsuit says, "Defendants not only deliberately defrauded Mary out of what was rightfully hers, they also kept her in the dark about it—until now."
     
    Last edited: Nov 11, 2020