Just a day after a judge temporarily blocked the release of a tell-all memoir by Donald Trump’s niece, a judge at a higher court reversed the decision. What an emotional rollercoaster this has been—a rollercoaster that will be very, very good for sales.
The New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division announced it was lifting a restraint imposed on publisher Simon & Schuster on Tuesday, which would have blocked the release of Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
“We support Mary L. Trump’s right to tell her story in Too Much and Never Enough, a work of great interest and importance to the national discourse that fully deserves to be published for the benefit of the American public,” Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, said in a statement. “As all know, there are well-established precedents against prior restraint and pre-publication injunctions, and we remain confident that the preliminary injunction will be denied.”
The restraining order was filed by Donald Trump’s younger brother Robert, who maintains that his niece violated a confidentiality agreement in writing the book. Lawyers for Robert have already refiled a claim in upstate New York.
According to NBC, Simon & Schuster says that any NDA that Mary Trump may or may not have signed isn’t really their problem:
“We did not learn anything about Ms. Trump signing any agreement concerning her ability to speak about her litigation with her family until shortly after press broke concerning Ms. Trump’s Book about two weeks ago, well after the Book had been accepted, put into production, and printing had begun,” Jonathan Karp, the CEO of Simon & Schuster, said in an affidavit filed Tuesday. “And we never saw any purported agreement until this action was filed against Ms. Trump and Simon & Schuster.”
In any case, 75,000 copies have already been printed, with enough preordered to put the memoir on Amazon’s bestseller list. The book is scheduled for release on July 28, and all of this legal tangling is better than any marketing money could buy.