Telegraph Claim Letter

30 January 2019

Mr Chris Evans
Editor
Telegraph Media Group ("TMG") 111 Buckingham Palace Road London SW1W 0DT

Dear Mr Evans

In the proposed matter of Burleigh v TMG

We act for Ms Nina Burleigh, from whom TMG commissioned an article "The Mystery of Melania" which ran as a Telegraph Magazine cover story on 19 January 2019 ("Article"), and also online from that date. The Article was based largely on reporting from Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump's Women, a book authored by Ms Burleigh and published in the United States by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster in October 2018 ("Book"). The Article was also authored by Ms Burleigh, and expressly attributed to her by TMG in the print version and online.

The following week, on 26 January 2019, without Ms Burleigh's knowledge or consent, TMG published a swift and prominent apology and retraction of multiple statements said to be contained in Ms Burleigh's Article. "Melania Trump - An Apology" ("Apology") was published by TMG on the second page of its print edition, and on its website, where it still appears, at the URL https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/26/melania-trump-apology/. We attach copies of the Apology and Article. Meanwhile, TMG removed the whole Article from its website, so that readers are unable to compare the Apology with the actual statements made in the Article.

This letter is written in accordance with the Pre-Action Protocol for Defamation, to which you are referred.

The Apology

The Apology is reproduced here in full:

Following last Saturday's (Jan 19) Telegraph magazine cover story "The mystery of Melania", we have been asked to make clear that the article contained a number of false statements which we accept should not have been published. Mrs Trump's father was not a fearsome presence and did not control the family. Mrs Trump did not leave her Design and Architecture course at University relating to the completion of an exam, as alleged in the article, but rather because she wanted to pursue a successful career as a professional model. Mrs Trump was not struggling in her modelling career before she met Mr Trump, and she did not advance in her career due to the assistance of Mr Trump.

We accept that Mrs Trump was a successful professional model in her own right before she met her husband and obtained her own modelling work without his assistance. Mrs Trump met Mr Trump in 1998, not in 1996 as stated in the article. The article also wrongly claimed that Mrs Trump's mother, father and sister relocated to New York in 2005 to live in buildings owned by Mr Trump. They did not. The claim that Mrs Trump cried on election night is also false.

We apologise unreservedly to The First Lady and her family for any embarrassment caused by our publication of these allegations. As a mark of our regret we have agreed to pay Mrs Trump substantial damages as well as her legal costs.

In short, your Apology traduces Ms Burleigh's reputation as a competent journalist by asserting that many of the statements in the Article and by extension in the Book from which the Article was derived, both authored by her, are false.

In fact, it is TMG's Apology that is false. It appears that fear of Mrs Trump's lawyer Mr Harder, the "Gawker slayer", caused TMG to capitulate abjectly in the face of his letter without regard to normal journalistic principles, at the cost of Ms Burleigh's personal and professional reputation. In reality, the statements in the Article that Mrs Trump complained about were (1) well-sourced, (2) professionally fact checked before publication, (3) extensively reviewed by a lawyer retained by Gallery, (4) given proper and prudent caveats in the Article, and (5) benign. TMG had nothing to apologise for, and both the fact that it did so, and the particularly lurid way it abandoned the Article, have turned Ms Burleigh into an international poster girl for "fake news".

In particular, the following statements in the Apology are defamatory of Ms Burleigh:

a. "the article contained a number of false statements which we accept should not have been published." This statement is untrue. The Article only contained statements which had been properly sourced. Most had been published before in Ms Burleigh's Book. The only exception was the word "fearsome" which TMG itself added shortly before publication, and which was a fair description of the evidence provided.

Not only were all the statements repudiated by TMG true, they were properly sourced, according to normal journalistic practice. TMG knew this. Ms Burleigh provided TMG with the names or descriptions of the sources she relied upon before the Apology was issued. (See Email from N Burleigh to R Murray, L Powell and E Rivlin, 23 January 2019.) Ms Burleigh had also sought comment from Mrs Trump a number of times before publication of her Book, but been rebuffed by her Press Secretary and Communications Director, Stephanie Grisham. TMG also knew this before publishing the Apology. Had TMG had any doubt about the sourcing or honesty of the Article, it had every opportunity to check before publication. The scrupulous line edit undertaken by Laura Powell, editor of the Magazine section in which the Article appeared, contains no requests for further checks or scepticism about the validity of Ms Burleigh's journalism. Indeed, Ms Powell praised the work in one email after the final round of edits: "Thanks again for a fascinating piece". Furthermore, editor Sasha Slater chose to make it the cover story.

b. "Mrs Trump met Mr Trump in 1998, not in 1996 as stated in the article." Unlike the Apology which categorically states that Mrs Trump met Mr Trump in 1998, the Article did not make any such categorical assertion about when they met. It simply states that one named source reported that Mrs Trump claimed in 1996 to know Mr Trump, while reporting with equal prominence in the same paragraph that another named source supported the "official story" that the couple only met in 1998. Ms Burleigh offers a balanced and carefully attributed account, which is accurate and true to her stated sources. The Apology, remarkably, mischaracterises the actual statements in Ms Burleigh's Article in order to disown and denounce them as "false".

RE: Burleigh v TMG - MCOSP-689575207-45031 30 January 2019
Page 2 of 5

c. "Mrs Trump's father was not a fearsome presence and did not control the family." Again, the Article is careful to attribute this description to its sources, Mrs Trump's childhood friends, not assert it as her own view. Nevertheless, it is also supported by the various other sources Ms Burleigh cited to TMG in her 23 January email. Finally, the Apology is untrue because it implies that Ms Burleigh used this phrase, which it disowns, when in fact TMG came up with this colourful epithet without Ms Burleigh's approval.

"The article also wrongly claimed that Mrs Trump's mother, father and sister relocated to New York in 2005 to live in buildings owned by Mr Trump. They did not." Ms Burleigh stands by the sources she has cited to TMG in her 23 January email. But anyway, the Article does not state that Mrs Trump's relatives "relocated" to New York, simply that they "decamped", which does not connote the level of permanence one might imply into "relocation". Again, the Apology apologizes for something the Article did not say. There is plenty of evidence to substantiate the fact that Mrs Trump's mother, father and sister did spend some time living or staying in buildings owned by Mr Trump.
"Mrs Trump did not leave her Design and Architecture course at University relating to the completion of an exam, as alleged in the article, but rather because she wanted to pursue a successful career as a professional model." In fact, the Article does not even allege that Mrs Trump left her Design and Architecture course, let alone that it was because of an exam. Rather it contains an anecdote about Mrs Trump taking an exam, attributed to the teaching assistant who was invigilating the exam. The Apology itself falsely imputes a statement to Ms Burleigh which she did not make, only to publicly denounce it, again impugning Ms Burleigh's integrity and competence as a reporter and journalist.
"Mrs Trump was not struggling in her modelling career before she met Mr Trump, and she did not advance in her career due to the assistance of Mr Trump." Ms Burleigh stands by her sources, including those provided to TMG in her 23 January email.

g. "The claim that Mrs Trump cried on election night is also false." Ms Burleigh's Article does not make this claim, it simply reiterates what is by now common knowledge that Michael Wolff reported this in his widely publicised and quoted book, Fire and Fury.1 The attribution to Ms Burleigh is false.

h. "We [TMG] apologise unreservedly to the First Lady and her family for any embarrassment. As a mark of our regret we have agreed to pay Mrs Trump substantial damages as well as her legal costs." This implies that Ms Burleigh's Article is extremely untrustworthy and inaccurate, such as to warrant an unreserved apology and substantial damages from TMG. This is untrue.

It is also shocking that TMG did not make any effort to clear the Apology with Ms Burleigh before issuing it. It sought information from her about the individual claims asserted by Mrs Trump's lawyers, but then bent over backwards simply to accept those assertions as true without cross-checking them with Ms Burleigh and published the Apology without warning to her. The fact that TMG apologized for statements that the Article did not even make illuminates how careless it was about the truth in its headlong retreat, and how craven was its desire to appease Mrs Trump.

1 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/15/fire-and-fury-inside-the-trump-white-house-by-michael- wolff-digested-read

RE: Burleigh v TMG - MCOSP-689575207-45031 30 January 2019
Page 3 of 5

The overall effect of the Apology is to make the reasonable reader believe that Ms Burleigh is an incompetent and unprofessional journalist, who made multiple unsupported allegations or deliberate lies without sources or without checking them. This is evidenced by the avalanche of commentary and ridicule Ms Burleigh is now being forced to endure from other media sources, too many to list and quote beyond a few examples:

• "So which writer got so much wrong, and so maliciously wrong? The article, written by Nina Burleigh, who works for Newsweek as national politics correspondent, was an excerpt of her upcoming book Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump's Women... And she refuses to admit to her many errors, despite the Telegraph pulling her piece and paying damages ..." Herald Sun, 26 January 2019. https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/third- minister-quits-will-the-last-out-turn-off-the-lights/news-story/e67925f4c39291e4c3645 e0c151a3acf

"In it, Burleigh even gets the date that Trump met his third wife wrong, writing that they met in 1996 when he was still married to Marla Maples." Daily Beast, 26 January 2019.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/britains-daily-telegraph-forced-to-apologize-to-melania-trump

"Perhaps Burleigh is telling the truth when she says her reporting is ironclad. Maybe the Telegraph is wrong. Maybe it's merely caving out of fear of a painful libel lawsuit. But it seems unlikely the paper would retract the story outright and agree to pay damages, had Burleigh not left them in a weak position by bungling the story considerably. Who simply gives in like that when they're right?" Washington Examiner, 28 January 2019.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/nina-burleigh-is-undeterred-after-having-two-pieces-retracted-in-less-than-a-year.

"The newspaper - after an unusually swift retraction and settlement - pulled the story by the US journalist Nina Burleigh, who works for Newsweek and is the author of the book Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump's Women. The Telegraph took the story down from its website and issued a lengthy point-by-point correction." Guardian, 26 January 2019.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/26/telegraph-apologises-and-pays-damages-to-melania-trump

Given that the Article, when published, was obviously derived from Ms Burleigh's Book (which was credited at the end along with the means of purchase and price), TMG's wholesale repudiation of its accuracy extends directly to the Book and so is very likely to impact Book sales. The link between the Article and Book is readily jumped on and reiterated in the publications quoted above. In soliciting the Article from Ms Burleigh, TMG sought temporary exclusivity of Book excerpts in the UK and promised to give the Book a "big push through [TMG's] online and social channels." (Email from L Powell to L Rhedd, 11 December 2018, 11:48h). The effect of suddenly deleting and repudiating the Article, which TMG had clearly sought out and valued as a cover story, will have the opposite effect on Book sales and her future ability to secure book contracts and freelance commissions on this and other topics and will cause Ms Burleigh serious financial loss.

REMEDIES

In the circumstances, we urgently seek the following remedies from you: • Removal of the Apology from your website.

RE: Burleigh v TMG - MCOSP-689575207-45031 30 January 2019
Page 4 of 5

Publication of a suitable apology to Ms Burleigh agreed with her:
-  in the next edition of the Telegraph and Telegraph Magazine, in a format agreed in advance with her that is at least as prominent as the Apology; and
-  in a position on the Telegraph website at least as prominent as the Apology for a period of at least 14 days after the removal of the Apology, and thereafter archived indefinitely so that it remains searchable.
Your undertaking not to repeat the allegations complained of.
Compensation for the damage to Ms Burleigh's reputation and for any financial loss she has or is likely to suffer.
Payment for the Article, as agreed between the Parties in advance of the publication.
Reimbursement of Ms Burleigh's legal costs.
Please reply to this letter as a matter of urgency and in any case by 4pm on 1 February.

In the meantime, our client reserves all her rights against TMG. Sincerely

McAllister Olivarius

Authorised and regulated in the UK by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, registration number 498087 Partners: Dr Ann Olivarius (Solicitor of England & Wales and U.S. attorney licensed in MN, NH, VA, DC, ID & NY)

Dr J.F.O. McAllister (Registered Foreign Lawyer and U.S. attorney licensed in NY & CT) MCOSP-689575207-45031

RE: Burleigh v TMG - MCOSP-689575207-45031 30 January 2019
Page 5 of 5

Media

Tags: