A growing feud between Melania Trump and Hunter Biden intensified Thursday after the son of former President Joe Biden delivered an expletive-filled response to the first lady’s demand for an apology over a claim he made linking her to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
In a YouTube interview last month with Andrew Callaghan, Hunter Biden alleged that Epstein — the financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide in jail in 2019 — was the one who first introduced Melania to her future husband, Donald Trump. Melania’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, denounced the claim in a letter to Hunter Biden last week, calling it false and “extremely salacious.”
In a letter to Hunter Biden, first reported by Fox News, Brito threatened a $1 billion lawsuit if he did not retract the claim, asserting that it had caused Melania Trump “overwhelming financial and reputational harm.”
On Thursday, Hunter Biden returned to Callaghan’s YouTube program, where he was given the chance to apologize to the first lady.
“F— that, that’s not going to happen,” he fired back.
“[Epstein and Trump] knew each other well, they spent an enormous amount of time together,” Hunter Biden said, referencing an excerpt from a book written by Michael Wolff, who claims to be a Trump biographer.
President Trump has dismissed Wolff as a “third-rate reporter” and cast doubt on many of the anecdotes he has written about Trump and his family, ABC News noted.
The Daily Beast, which also covered Wolff’s claim, removed its story after receiving a similar letter from Melania Trump’s attorney and issued an apology “for any confusion or misunderstanding.”
“I only can go by what people are saying, I don’t know,” Hunter Biden told Callaghan.
“If they want to sit down for a deposition and clarify the nature of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein — if the president and the first lady want to do that … I’m more than happy to provide them the platform to be able to do it,” he added.
Nick Clemens, a spokesman for Melania, responded to a request for comment from ABC News with this: “First Lady Melania Trump’s attorneys are actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies by those who spread malicious, defamatory falsehoods. The true account of how the First Lady met President Trump is in her best-selling book, ‘Melania.’”
In her memoir, Melania Trump, a former model. wrote that she met Donald at a 1998 Fashion Week party in New York, where they were introduced by a modeling agent.