Bill Maher took aim at Hunter Biden after Melania Trump revealed she plans to sue him for defamation after he claimed she was introduced to Donald Trump by Jeffrey Epstein. The first lady revealed Wednesday that she will sue Hunter for $1 billion after he refused to apologize and take down a podcast video where he made the false claim.

Maher, one of the few liberals who criticized the coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story, took his shots at the troubled former First Son on his HBO show. ‘Melania says she’s gonna sue Hunter Biden,’ he said, to immediate chuckles from the audience. ‘That’s not the joke part! I really like this where she says she’s gonna sue him for a billion dollars.’

He then explained why the first lady was suing Biden before delivering the punchline. ‘If Hunter loses, it’s going to be weird for him writing a woman a check because she’s not a prostitute,’ Maher joked to laughs and applause. Maher famously said in 2022 there was a ‘conspiracy to get rid of’ ex-President Donald Trump that involved suppressing the New York Post’s infamous Hunter Biden laptop story.

The controversy began in an interview with the Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan podcast, where Hunter Biden cited a Daily Beast report for his claim about the first lady sourced to author Michael Wolff. The first lady’s lawyer Alejandro Brito called Hunter Biden’s comments ‘false, defamatory, and lewd’. ‘Given your vast history of trading on the names of others—including your surname—for your personal benefit, it is obvious that you published these false and defamatory statements about Mrs. Trump to draw attention to yourself,’ Brito wrote in a letter, first obtained by Fox News Digital.

After Mrs. Trump threatened legal action, Hunter shared his public reaction on Callaghan’s show. ‘F**k that. That’s not going to happen,’ Biden replied, after Callaghan showed him a copy of the letter. Hunter defended his comments, citing reporting from Wolff’s book, and a 2019 story from the New York Times that reported Epstein was ‘claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump’.

Other media outlets backed down from the false claim, including the Daily Beast, which retracted the story and apologized. Political operative James Carville also deleted a podcast video where he made the claim and apologized. Hunter defied the lawsuit threat and vowed to take the Trumps to court, even as he estimated the lawsuit would probably cost ‘millions’ of dollars. ‘If they want to go through the process, then they know it’s going to cost them an enormous amount of money to do it,’ he said. ‘We gotta figure out how we’re going to pay for it.’

The president is championing the decision by his wife to sue Biden for his claim. ‘I told her, let’s go ahead and do it. I let her use my lawyers,’ Trump revealed to Fox News radio host Brian Kilmeade in an interview on Thursday. ‘She was very upset about it.’ Trump repeated that the claim was false and easily disproven. ‘Jeffrey Epstein had nothing to do with Melania and introducing,’ he said, criticizing Hunter and other media outlets that aired the claim. ‘But they do that to demean, they make up stories … I mean, I can tell you exactly how … it was another person, actually. I did meet through another person. But it wasn’t Jeffrey Epstein.’

The president pointed to his success in getting media outlets to back down in response to lawsuits, which prompted his endorsement of the lawsuit. ‘I said go forward, you know, I’ve done pretty well on these lawsuits lately,’ Trump said.