NEW YORK—Mary Trump can talk about the memoir she wrote about her uncle, President Donald Trump, after the president’s brother requested a judge cancel a temporary restraining order from June 30 on Monday, allowing the president’s only niece to freely publicize and distribute her work.
An appeals judge had already ruled on July 1 that the publisher of Trump’s niece’s memoir, Simon & Schuster, was not bound by the confidentiality agreement that she signed, allowing it to print and distribute the 240-page book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” which is scheduled to be released on July 14.
The judge said the confidentiality clauses in the 2001 agreement “viewed in the context of the current Trump family circumstances in 2020, would ‘…offend public policy as a prior restraint on protected speech…'”
“Notwithstanding that the book has been published and distributed in great quantities, to enjoin Mary L. Trump at this juncture would be incorrect and serve no purpose. It would be moot,” the judge wrote.
Greenwald said the confidentiality agreement that settled multiple lawsuits mainly concerned the financial aspect of the deal, which isn’t as interesting now as it might have been two decades ago.
“On the other hand the non-confidential part of the agreement, the Trump family relationships may be more interesting now in 2020 with a Presidential election on the horizon,” the judge said.
According to the book’s description, it seeks to trace how family members were affected by the president’s father, a successful real estate owner, and provides Mary Trump’s insights on how the president may have developed some of the traits that he is known for in the White House.
The publisher describes Mary Trump as a trained clinical psychologist with a PhD from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies.
The book was originally to be published at the end of July. The publisher announced last week it would be published Tuesday.
Mary Trump’s lawyer, Theodore Boutrous Jr., said the judge “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,” he said in a statement.
In a statement, Simon & Schuster said it was “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.”
It added: “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,“ it added. “‘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.”
Messages seeking comment were left with an attorney for Robert Trump.
On the eve of its publication, Mary Trump’s book was ranked No. 1 on the Amazon.com list of best-selling books.
