First Lady Melania Trump has threatened to sue Hunter Biden after he repeated a controversial claim about her in an interview.
Her lawyer, Alejandro Brito, sent Biden a letter demanding that he take back what he said during an August 5 YouTube interview with Andrew Callaghan. In that interview, Biden repeated a claim from a biographer that Jeffrey Epstein was the person who introduced Melania to President Donald Trump.
“These false and harmful statements have spread widely online,” Brito wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Fox News Digital. He said millions of people have now seen the video.
Trump and her lawyer gave Biden until August 7 to retract the video and issue an apology. If not, they said she would sue him for $1 billion in damages to her reputation.
However, Biden did not back down. In a follow-up August 14 interview with Callaghan, Biden bluntly said, “F— that. That’s not gonna happen.”
He argued that the claims had already been reported by biographer Michael Wolff and in other media since 2019. “I don’t see how this rises to the level of defamation,” Biden said.
Biden also added: “This is about Jeffrey Epstein, who abused hundreds of minors. The Trumps are just trying to distract from that. They think a billion dollars will scare me, but it won’t.” He even said he would welcome the chance for the Trumps to sit for a deposition about their ties to Epstein.
The Trumps’ legal team specifically blamed Wolff, calling him a “serial fabulist” whose reporting was unreliable. Last month, The Daily Beast deleted an article citing Wolff after facing legal threats from Melania’s lawyers.
Other figures have already backed down. Political analyst James Carville apologized on his podcast after making similar claims.
Melania’s spokesperson, Nick Clemens, told PEOPLE that her lawyers are “actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies” from anyone spreading “malicious falsehoods.”
In her 2024 memoir Melania, the first lady wrote that she actually met Trump at the Kit Kat Klub in New York City during Fashion Week in September 1998. Trump was with another woman at the time, but still asked for her number. She gave him her number later, and they married in January 2005.
