Author Michael Wolff is flipping the script on First Lady Melania Trump, beating the first lady to the courthouse with his own defamation lawsuit in response to her threats to sue him for his comments about her marriage to the president.

Mr. Wolff’s mad dash to the courthouse is in response to a sharp letter sent by Ms. Trump’s attorneys last week suggesting that he defamed the first lady by suggesting she was “very involved” in the social circle frequented by her husband and the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein in the 1990s.

“To be perfectly honest, I’d like nothing better than to get Donald Trump and Melania Trump under oath in front of a court reporter and actually find out all of the details of their relationship with Epstein,” Mr. Wolff said in a statement to Deadline.

In his lawsuit, filed with the state Supreme Court at Manhattan, Mr. Wolff alleges that Mr. and Ms. Trump routinely threaten their critics with expensive litigation designed to suppress dissent, intimidate opposition, and force unwarranted financial settlements or what he calls coerced apologies and retractions.

Mr. Wolff’s lawsuit claims that the first lady issued a “threat to sue” after his comments appeared in The Daily Beast and in videos posted to social media. He says they were taken out of context and that some of his statements — including that the Trumps are in a “sham marriage” or “trophy marriage” — are protected speech since they are “fair and justified” opinions.

“Mr. Wolff is a journalist who has done his job diligently, reporting what he knows; identifying what he does not know; and asking important questions that deserve inquiry,” the lawsuit says. 

“Mr. Wolff has no choice but to defend himself and to assert his rights under the Constitution, the New York Constitution and the anti-SLAPP [Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation] Law.”

The lawsuit also alleges that it is fair to question how Ms. Trump fits into the Epstein saga, saying it is perfectly  normal to want to “find out what happened in Mr. Trump’s and Epstein’s 10 years of pursuing models, including supermodels, runway models, catalog models, Eastern European models, and girls who just dreamed of being models.”

The suit does not specify the damages that Mr. Wolff is seeking and was filed on the day that Ms. Trump’s lawyer had set as a deadline for the journalist to retract his statements.

“First Lady Melania Trump is proud to continue standing up to those who spread malicious and defamatory falsehoods as they desperately try to get undeserved attention and money from their unlawful conduct,” Ms. Trump’s spokesperson, Nicolas Clemens, said in a statement provided to The Associated Press.