The Daily Telegraph apologises for false statements about US First Lady Melania Trump

The Daily Telegraph has apologised for a number of false statements made in its Saturday Magazine cover story: “The Mystery Melania”.

The newspaper printed an apology on Saturday and also agreed to cover Melania Trump’s legal costs.

The original article had claimed that the US First Lady was struggling in her modelling career before meeting her husband, US President Donald Trump, and that she had cried on election night.

However, the paper has accepted that these statements should not have been published.

In the apology, the Telegraph accepted that Melania Trump was "a successful professional model in her own right before she met her husband and obtained her own modelling work without his assistance".

It also admitted that statements regarding her family and father had been wrong.

The paper said it was wrong to claim that Melania Trump’s mother, father and sister had relocated to New York in 2005 to live in buildings owned by Donald Trump.

It added that her father was not "a fearsome presence" and "did not control the family", as alleged in the article.

Finally, it accepted that she left her Design and Architecture course at university because she wanted to pursue a successful career as a professional model, rather than for reasons relating to the completion of an exam as it had originally claimed.