First lady Melania Trump pushed back on the criticism of her in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, calling the book “fiction,” through her communications director.
“The book is a work of fiction,” Stephanie Grisham said in a statement provided to CNN.
“It is a long-form tabloid that peddles false statements and total fabrications about Mrs. Trump,” Grisham said. ”In short, it’s irresponsible and yet another ‘journalist’ looking to profit off the Trump family and this administration.”
Grisham spoke out against the book earlier when excerpts were released, including the author’s claim that Melania Trump was deeply saddened when her husband, Donald Trump, was elected president.
“This book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction section,” Grisham said. “Mrs. Trump supported her husband’s decision to run for president and, in fact, encouraged him to do so.”
“She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did,” Grisham said.
CNN reported:
Grisham’s most recent response came on the heels of passages in Wolff’s book that claim the President is a chronic philanderer, and that Mr. and Mrs. Trump wouldn’t see each other for days at a time, even when both were at Trump Tower in New York.
Wolff also wrote Trump was an absentee father to the couple’s son, Barron Trump.
“Freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to tell lies,” Grisham said about the book’s claims. “Perhaps one day she will tell her own truthful story, but until then Mrs. Trump is focused on her role as first lady.”
In the Author’s Note section of the book, Wolff admits his book contains a “looseness of the truth.”
“Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue,” Wolff wrote. “Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.”
President Trump also is pushing back against Wolff’s charges about his mental stability and intelligence.