NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) - President Donald Trump's younger brother lost his fight for an injunction against a damning memoir written by their estranged niece, Mary Trump, who said her book will expose the toxic nature of the family.
Robert Trump's motion for a preliminary injunction against the scheduled July 14 release of the book was denied on Monday (July 13) by Justice Hal Greenwald in Poughkeepsie, New York, according to a copy of the order provided by the book publisher, Simon & Schuster.
"The unfettered right to publish is a sacred American freedom and a founding principle of our republic, and we applaud the court for affirming well-established precedents against prior restraint and pre-publication injunctions," the publisher said in a statement.
The lawsuit alleges the memoir violates a secrecy deal the family struck as part of a 2001 settlement agreement over the will of the family's late patriarch, Fred Trump. Mary Trump and Simon & Schuster argued the agreement isn't valid and that it can't override her First Amendment rights.
The memoir, "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man," portrays the president as a liar and narcissist who rose to power after being coddled by his father, the media and banks. Details from the book have been widely reported in the media.
Greenwald noted in his decision that more than 600,000 copies of the book have already been shipped.
"Comparing the potential enormous cost and logistical nightmare of stopping the publication, recalling and removing hundreds of thousands of books from all types of booksellers, brick and mortar and virtual, libraries and private citizens, is an insurmountable task at this time," the judge wrote.
Robert Trump's lawyer Charles Harder didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
"The First Amendment forbids prior restraints because they are intolerable infringements on the right to participate in democracy," Theodore Boutrous, Mary Trump's lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, said in an emailed statement. "Tomorrow, the American public will be able to read Mary's important words for themselves."
Mary Trump wrote in the book that she was first moved to take action in 2017 as she watched "democracy disintegrating and people's lives unravelling" as a result of her uncle's actions. She also claims she was the source of leaked Trump Organization tax documents central to a Pulitzer Prize-winning report in the New York Times detailing the president's finances. That report revealed financial schemes used by the president during the 1990s to avoid tax liabilities.
The president previously dismissed the Times report as a "hit piece" that was "old" and "boring".
Last week, White House spokesman Kayleigh McEnany called Mary Trump's work "a book of falsehoods" full of "absurd allegations".
The book was originally put under a temporary restraining order before a July 10 hearing, but an appeals court judge lifted the ban on publication. Simon & Schuster then announced it was moving up the publication date by two weeks to July 14.
