President Trump has reached a settlement with his niece, Mary Trump, closing a lawsuit he filed five years ago after accusing her of leaking his confidential financial records to The New York Times.
Both sides’ attorneys filed a joint letter with a New York state court in Manhattan on Tuesday. “The parties are pleased to report they have reached a settlement,” the letter said, adding they expect a formal dismissal “with prejudice” to follow in the coming weeks. That means Trump can’t come back and sue her again on the same grounds.
The case went back to 2018. That year, the Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation claiming Trump’s late father, Fred Trump Sr., had transferred at least $413 million to his son over the course of decades, partly through real estate maneuvers the paper labeled “dubious tax schemes.” The story leaned on confidential financial documents.
Trump filed suit in 2021, naming Mary Trump, the Times, and three of the paper’s reporters as defendants. He said they had worked together to obtain records shielded by a 2001 confidentiality agreement, signed when the family settled Fred Trump Sr.’s estate. In court filings, Trump accused the reporters of persuading his niece to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office.” He called the whole scheme an “insidious plot” fueled by a “personal vendetta.”
Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist. She confirmed in her 2020 memoir, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” that she had cooperated with the reporters. Her legal team dismissed Trump’s lawsuit as “baseless” and argued his reading of the confidentiality clause was unreasonably broad.
The courts gave a split verdict over time. A judge tossed Trump’s claims against the newspaper and the reporters in 2023 and ordered him to pay close to $400,000 in their legal fees. A year later, however, a state appeals court found there was real legal footing for the confidentiality claim against Mary Trump personally. Damages, the court said, would likely be “nominal,” not anywhere near $100 million.
