The first lady is taking legal action against those who have helped spread a disputed claim that Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to her husband

Melania Trump has threatened to sue Hunter Biden over claims he made in a recent interview. A lawyer for the first lady, Alejandro Brito, sent a letter to Biden demanding a full retraction of an interview he did with Andrew Callaghan that was posted to YouTube on Aug. 5. In the video, Biden repeats a biographer’s claim that Jeffrey Epstein was the one who initially introduced Donald Trump to his third wife. “These false, disparaging, defamatory, and inflammatory statements are extremely salacious and have been widely disseminated throughout various digital mediums,” Brito wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Fox News Digital. “Indeed, the video has since been re-published by various media outlets, journalists, and political commentators with millions of social media followers that have disseminated the false and defamatory statements therein to tens of millions of people worldwide.”

Trump, 55, and Brito demanded that Biden, 55, “immediately retract the false, defamatory, disparaging and inflammatory statements made about Mrs. Trump.” If he failed to comply, the letter continued, the first lady planned to sue Biden for $1 billion in order to “recover the overwhelming financial and reputational harm that you have caused her to suffer,” Brito wrote.

Trump and Brito’s letter gave Biden until Aug. 7 to comply with their demands for not just a retraction of the video, but also an apology for the “false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading and inflammatory statements about Mrs. Trump.” It seems that Biden didn’t give them what they wanted. In a new video with Callaghan posted on Aug. 14, Biden replies concisely when asked if he plans to apologize to the first lady: “F— that. That’s not gonna happen.” He cites Trump biographer Michael Wolff as well as other reports dating “back to 2019,” which have made the same claim about Epstein and the Trumps. “I don’t think that these threats of a lawsuit add up to anything other than a distraction because it’s not about who introduced whom to whom. I don’t know how that, in any way, rises to the level of defamation to begin with,” Biden said.

“But the fact of the matter is that this is about hundreds, if not thousands, of minors, children, who were raped by Jeffrey Epstein,” he continued. “I don’t believe in guilt by association alone, but the connections have become so glaringly obvious that I think they’re trying to use other things to distract.”

“I also think they’re bullies,” Biden added of the Trumps and their legal team, “and they think that a billion dollars is going to scare me. The fact of the matter is that… if they want to sit down for a deposition and clarify the nature of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein, if the president and the first lady want to do that, and all of the known associates around them at the time that they met, I’m more than happy to provide them the platform to be able to do it.”

Trump and Brito did proactively call out Wolff as the source of Biden’s claim in their letter, referring to the author and biographer as a “serial fabulist… whose lies were published by The Daily Beast.” Last month, the Daily Beast published a story titled “Melania Trump ‘very involved’ in Epstein Scandal: Author,” which cited Wolff in making claims similar to Biden’s. After being threatened with legal repercussions, the outlet deleted the story in its entirety. Political analyst James Carville also recently issued an apology to the first lady after making similar claims on his podcast last week and promptly hearing from Melania’s lawyers. PEOPLE has reached out to lawyers for both Trump and Biden for further comment, and asked Callaghan whether he plans to take down the Biden interview that prompted the legal threat.

The first lady’s spokesperson, Nick Clemens, shared a statement with PEOPLE that read: “First Lady Melania Trump’s attorneys are actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies by those who spread malicious, defamatory falsehoods. The true account of how the First Lady met President Trump is in her best-selling book, Melania.” In the memoir, which she released in October 2024, the first lady said she met her future husband at the Kit Kat Klub in New York City during Fashion Week in September 1998. He was on a date with a different woman at the time, an “attractive blonde,” the first lady recalled, but asked for her phone number anyway. “From the moment our conversation began, I was captivated by his charm and easygoing nature,” she wrote. Trump declined to give the businessman her number, asking for his instead. She called him a few days later, and the pair married in January 2005.