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Mary Trump claims her uncle cut off the health insurance of her brother's infant son who suffered from cerebral palsy, and then swindled her.
A new lawsuit claims that years before he became president, Donald Trump was so intent on defrauding his lesbian niece, Mary. L. Trump, out of her rightful share of his late father's will that he cut off the health insurance of his nephew's infant son to force them to the negotiating table.
"I was angry they were suing us," then-candidate Donald Trump admitted to the New York Times in 2016.
According to the lawsuit filed Thursday in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, then-real estate mogul Trump, his sister Maryanne, and his later brother Robert were supposed to act as protective fiduciaries to a then-teenaged Mary Trump, but instead swindled her.
She claims the trio used a three-part scheme to defraud her. First, the siblings "fraudulently siphoned valued" from Mary's interests to entities they "owned and controlled." Second, the lawsuit claims the group "fraudulently depressed the value of Mary's interests, and the net income they generated, in part through fraudulent appraisals and financial statements." Based on what she was given, Mary believed the family was worth $30 million, but later learned that she deserved a share of a $1 billion sum. Finally, Mary claims they forced her to the negotiating table by "threatening to bankrupt Mary's interests and by canceling the healthcare policy that was keeping Fred III's infant son alive," and then presented her with "a stack of fraudulent valuations and financial statements, and a written agreement that itself memorialized their fraud, and obtained her signature."
The lawsuit describes these three parts of the alleged scheme as the Grift, the Devaluing, and the Squeeze-Out.
"[F]raud was not just the family business," the documents state. "It was a way of life."
Trump does not deny the claim he cut off the health insurance for his nephew's infant son. His older brother and the younger Mary's father, Fred Jr., died in 1981 at the age of 46 from a heart attack following years of heavy drinking. His struggles with alcohol saw him eventually quit his job as a pilot with TWA and waste away physically. Trump had initially admired and respected his older brother, but his opinion of him soured as Fred Jr. began drinking more heavily, a view shared by the rest of their siblings and their late father.
Mary Trump recently published a book detailing her life living in the shadow of her famous uncle, entitled Too Much and Never Enough: How My family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. She exclusively told The Advocate the everyone in her "family was misogynist" and "the only two men that mattered in my family were Donald and my grandfather."
The lawsuit seeks more than half a million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages.
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