Melania Trump, the wife of US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, is suing the Maryland-based publisher of the Daily Mail Online and a blogger on over stories about her past she believes are "tremendously damaging".
A Daily Mail story last month cited a Slovenian magazine's report that a modelling agency that Trump worked with in New York in the 1990s also served as an escort business, linking wealthy clients with women for sexual services.
Late Thursday, the Daily Mail retracted the story in a posting on its website.
"To the extent that anything in the Daily Mail's article was interpreted as stating or suggesting that Mrs Trump worked as an 'escort' or in the 'sex business'... is hereby retracted, and the Daily Mail newspaper regrets any such misinterpretation."
Trump had notified the British newspaper and other news organisations on August 22 that she would take legal action, Trump's lawyer, Charles Harder, said in an email at the time, calling the reports "outright lying."
"These defendants made several statements about Mrs. Trump that are 100 per cent false and tremendously damaging to her personal and professional reputation," he said in a statement on Thursday. The lawsuit was filed in state circuit court in Montgomery County, Maryland.
The lawsuit alleges that the Maryland blogger, Webster Griffin Tarpley, published "false and defamatory statements" about Trump, including that the former model had suffered from "a full-blown nervous breakdown."
Tarpley could not immediately be reached for comment.
"Defendants' actions are so egregious, malicious and harmful to Mrs. Trump that her damages are estimated at $US150 million ($A199 million) dollars," her lawyer's statement said.
Trump, who now has her own jewelry line, was born in Slovenia and moved to the United States in the 1990s. She married Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee for the November 8 election, in 2005.
