LONDON: Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper on Wednesday apologized to US First Lady Melania Trump and agreed to pay her damages over an article that included allegations that she worked as an escort in the 1990s.
“The defendant is here today publicly to set the record straight, and to apologize to the claimant for any distress and embarrassment that the articles may have caused her,” Catrin Evans, the lawyer for Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail and MailOnline, told the High Court in London.
Although the total amount of damages was not disclosed, the Press Association news agency said it was believed to be under $3 million (2.8 million euros).
John Kelly, Melania Trump’s lawyer, said the article in the Daily Mail — Britain’s second biggest-selling newspaper — in print and online in August last year “included false and defamatory claims.”
The allegations “questioned the nature of her work as a professional model, and republished allegations that she provided services beyond simply modelling,” Kelly said.
The article stated that there was no support for the allegations and provided denials from her spokesperson and from Paolo Zampolli, who ran the modelling agency where she worked.
But the allegations “strike at the heart of the claimant’s personal integrity and dignity,” Kelly added.
Trump’s lawyers launched a lawsuit against the Daily Mail in September in New York, asking for $150 million in damages.
The paper had already published a retraction in September, saying it “did not intend to state or suggest that these allegations are true.”
In documents filed in February, the US first lady said that because of the Daily Mail’s allegations she and her brand had missed out on “multiple millions of dollars” in licensing, marketing and endorsement opportunities that would otherwise have been available to someone spending time as “one of the most photographed women in the world.”
She said the publication had prevented her from reaping the “once-in-a-lifetime” windfall to be had as a business lady married to new US President Donald Trump.
Daily Mail pays Melania Trump damages over escort claim
Daily Mail pays Melania Trump damages over escort claim
‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance
PARK CITY: As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.
In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.
For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.
There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.
"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.
"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."
The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.
It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.
Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."
And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.
"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."
