Melania Trump threatens former modeling friend with defamation lawsuit over Epstein allegations
Trump attorneys issued another batch of defamation claims this week regarding claims made about her history with Paolo Zampolli, a longtime friend of the Trumps and Jeffrey Epstein.
First Lady Melania Trump on Tuesday made another defamation threat against individuals linking her and the president to Jeffrey Epstein, alleging they caused her “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” through comments made during a live YouTube interview last week.
Trump’s legal team sent a retraction demand to journalist Zev Shalev and diplomat Amanda Ungaro, who shared the letter with COURIER. In it, attorneys outline three statements made during the hourlong interview they contend are defamatory toward Mrs. Trump. The comments in question center on Ungaro’s former partner, Paolo Zampolli, a longtime friend of the Trumps who currently works in the administration and has maintained that it was he, not Epstein, who introduced the future first couple in 1998.
Ungaro and others dispute that account, claiming that Zampolli falsely took credit for introducing the couple in order to shield them from scrutiny during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. During the interview, Ungaro and Shalev also discuss how Melania has remained unusually close to Zampolli and supposedly pressured her husband into giving him a role within the administration.
The contested statements include the title of the video itself — “First Lady Spy Scandal,” even though the word “spy” is not mentioned once during the interview -— and two comments made by Shalev:
“What is she trying to hide? Why come out with a statement like that without ever needing to?” Shalev said, describing an April press conference held by Mrs. Trump. “It’s really the man that you have in common with her, which is Paolo Zampolli.”
Later in the interview, Shalev added, “Melania tried to get [Zampolli] to be an ambassador … and she went on to insist that he become a special envoy. … He brought her to the United States, he’s in constant contact with her, she’s rewarded him with this special envoy title.”
Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, reviewed the letter at COURIER’s request and said defamation threats like this are often used by powerful people to intimidate critics into silence.
“Defamation lawsuits and threats of litigation have too often been used by the powerful as a tool to stifle constitutionally protected criticism. President Trump and his allies have repeatedly employed that tactic,” Terr said in a statement. “We take no position on whether the statements challenged in this demand letter are defamatory. But it’s notable that the letter characterizes the challenged statements at a high level of generality, offering little explanation of why they’re defamatory, while baldly asserting the speakers knew they were making false statements.”
Alejandro Brito, the Florida-based attorney representing the First Lady, did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Melania has vehemently denied accusations that she was an escort, and has been aggressively litigious when confronted about her association with Zampolli and how she met her husband. Her first major lawsuits came in September 2016 against the Daily Mail and Tarpley.net, a small Maryland-based blog. The Daily Mail reported that she and Zampolli ran an escort service disguised as a modeling agency, while Tarpley alleged that Melania had worked as an escort. Two months later, she threatened to sue People magazine for publishing a firsthand account of a woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in 2005, while Melania was pregnant.
Melania prevailed in her suit against the Daily Mail, securing $3 million in damages and a public apology. Tarpley settled before the case went to trial, and was ordered to issue an apology and pay a “substantial sum,” according to Politico. The defamation lawsuit against People never materialized, and the magazine never retracted its story.
Litigation largely took a pause during the four years’ between Trump’s presidencies. Melania remained noticeably silent throughout her husband’s legal battle with writer E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury determined was raped (as the term is commonly understood) and later defamed by Trump. But the legal threats ramped back up as the Department of Justice’s partial release of the Epstein Files brought renewed scrutiny on the Trumps’ history with the convicted sex trafficker.
In August 2025, the First Lady threatened to file a $1 billion defamation lawsuit against Hunter Biden over comments he made during an interview with Channel 5 reporter Andrew Callaghan. Biden repeated the claim that Epstein introduced Melania and Donald and said he believed that future releases from the Epstein Files would further implicate the president. To date, no lawsuit has been filed and Biden, who refused to apologize, publicly welcomed any legal challenge that would allow him to depose members of the Trump family.
Two months later, Mrs. Trump sent a demand letter to journalist and Epstein confidante Michael Wolff, ordering him to retract and apologize for his public statements claiming Epstein introduced Melania to Donald Trump.That dispute remains ongoing. This past Tuesday, Melania filed a motion requesting that the court sanction Wolff, accusing him of using their legal battle as a fundraising opportunity.
In addition to the retraction demand sent to Shalev and Ungaro, the First Lady’s lawyers this week sent a similar letter to blogger Anthony Andrews over a Substack post he made about President Trump. The letter to Andrews, who has less than 1,000 subscribers on the platform and has recently written about Zampolli and Ungaro, suggests the White House is willing to cast a wide net in its efforts to silence any commentary speculating on the relationship between Epstein, Zampolli, and the Trumps.
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