Why Melania Trump Is Hiding From Me: Wolff

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles with a story Trump World would rather bury: his legal pursuit of Melania Trump after she threatened a $1 billion libel suit over his reporting on her ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Wolff details the surreal effort to serve the First Lady—lawyers refusing papers, process servers turned away, Trump Tower staff claiming she lives there while she avoids being found—and explains why he sued first under New York’s anti-intimidation law. The legal farce opens onto something larger: a family operating in secrecy and fear, a president trying to “serve” his wife even as control slips, and a White House where avoidance has become strategy. As Trump’s foreign policy grows more erratic and Europe edges toward war, the question lingers: is Melania’s disappearance just legal gamesmanship—or another sign of a presidency retreating from accountability?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Melania Trump is hiding from me.
0:03.1	No, she's avoiding you.
0:04.8	Yes, yes, yes.
0:06.0	And how do you know that?
0:07.1	You begin with the fact that no one, it's not quite unclear how to sue the First
0:11.2	Lady of the United States.
0:12.2	There's not a lot of models for this.
0:14.2	And then obviously it's quite unclear how you serve a subpoena on someone who has one of the most elaborate security
0:23.5	details in the world.
0:29.0	Michael.
0:31.0	Joanna.
0:31.9	I wish people could have seen you come into the office this morning dressed as Nanook of the
0:37.2	North.
0:37.7	Well, you know, it was very, very cold when I left at before...
0:43.3	Never than that. Nevertheless.
0:45.3	You looked like someone from Alaska. I mean, you could raise your leg to show people your snow boots, which I couldn't stop laughing at.
0:53.8	And you had a hat on,
0:54.9	and then you had a kind of bare skin of a coat. Yeah, no, no, it's, it's, I'm ready. I'm, I'm dressed for
1:00.9	all, all possibilities, all occasions. Just tell me, I got the wardrobe for it. Okay, well, there's a lot of
1:08.1	occasions coming at us today because we've got the Melania
1:12.1	premiere and we need to know the update of what's happening with you in Melania. We've got the Epstein
1:18.4	files this week, which we need to talk about. We've got Mark Bennett pleading with Donald Trump
	...

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