The UK newspaper The Telegraph has apologized for a Jan. 19 magazine cover story about Melania Trump that they now say contains “false statements which we accept should not have been published,” further agreeing to pay the first lady “substantial damages” and her legal costs.
“We apologise unreservedly to The First Lady and her family for any embarrassment caused by our publication of these allegations,” the newspaper published Saturday. “As a mark of our regret we have agreed to pay Mrs. Trump substantial damages as well as her legal costs.”
The Telegraph retracted several claims about Trump’s career as a model before and after meeting Donald Trump, including that he helped advance her modeling career. The article also retracted a characterization of her father as “a fearsome presence.”
“We accept that Mrs. Trump was a successful professional model in her own right before she met her husband and obtained her own modelling [sic] work without his assistance. Mrs Trump met Mr Trump in 1998, not in 1996 as stated in the article,” the Telegraph continued. “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.”
In 2017, the British publication The Daily Mail paid Trump $2.9 million in damages and costs to settle a lawsuit about other false statements and apologized.
Read The Telegraph’s full apology here.