The Mysteries of Melania Trump: What Does the First Lady Know?

The enigmatic FLOTUS has been with Donald for over 25 years. What was the nature of *her* relationship with Jeffrey Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell? And why is no one asking?

Although she was known to the editors of the New York City tabloids, the more avid fans of the Howard Stern show, and the handful of photographers and other modeling industry hands who worked on her occasional photo shoots, Melania Knauss toiled in obscurity until her 34th birthday: April 26, 2004.

That’s when she turned heads at the Met Gala, decked out in a one-of-a-kind Versace couture dress her fiancé had made a big show of winning at a charity auction the year before; when she sported the $1.5 million diamond engagement ring he slipped on her finger right before the Gala started; and when she went up a level in the eyes of the editors of Vogue, who sponsored the event, thus confirming, or seeming to confirm, her “supermodel” bona fides, such as they were.¹

That’s when Melania Knauss became MELANIA.

Eleven days earlier, perhaps as a warmup for the big event, Knauss, who by then had been living at Trump Tower for two years, appeared for the first time on Donald’s hit reality TV program “The Apprentice.” The S1 finale is full of the low-stakes-presented-as-high-stakes drama slickly manufactured by Mark Burnett and the other producers, and features such luminaries as Omarosa, Jessica Simpson, and eventual winner Bill Rancic. Melania’s brief cameo was lost in the hoopla and not particularly memorable. As Ken Otterbourg recalled in the Washington Post in 2016:

“The Apprentice” isn’t a documentary. It’s a reality show, with the emphasis on show. What happens — what we see — is what the producers want us to see. And here’s some of what we saw, which is instructive when you consider all that has since taken place: First, Trump doesn’t wait for Melania when he gets off the helicopter at the Trump Taj Mahal. Then a contestant mispronounces her name. Finally, she gets to say exactly six words, which are: “It’s so cute. It’s really good.”

The wedding—a lavish affair at Mar-a-Lago, attended by Donald’s 2016 election opponent Hillary Clinton and her husband, Trump’s fellow Jeffrey Epstein chum Bill Clinton, as well as sleazy boxing promoter Don King, disgraced drunkard Rudy Giuliani, disgraced “Today” host Matt Lauer, and professional asshole Simon Cowell, and featuring musical performances by Elton John, Tony Bennett, Paul Anka, and Billy Joel—took place on January 22, 2005. That’s when Melania signed the prenup, donned the Dior dress, walked down the aisle, and changed her surname for the second time.²

That was ages ago. We’ve known Melania Trump for over 20 years—including four and a half as First Lady of the United States—and yet she remains an enigma.³ Although she’s been in the public eye for two decades, and is married to the most famous human of the 21st century,⁴ she’s still the same mysterious Slovene who emigrated to the country in 1996.⁵

Melania is everyone and no one, famous and anonymous, powerhouse and cipher, the First Lady and the Invisible Girl. “She is like a ghost,” the photographer Jarl Alé de Basseville, who took her pictures when she first arrived in New York, told Mary Jordan for her 2020 biography, The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump. “Everyone knows her, but no one does.”

This is, to some degree, intentional—cultivated. Melania remains aloof on purpose, as she explains in her 2024 memoir, Melania: “I have chosen to maintain a more discreet presence in the public eye, in stark contrast to Donald. I have always prized my privacy and opted for a more selective lifestyle.”

Bet.

Prizing privacy and embracing a “selective” lifestyle—whatever that means—has its advantages. Melania is a blank canvas, a (ghostly?) white silkscreen on which, during the 2016 presidential campaign and the subsequent transition especially, we projected our own cares and concerns, our own principles and prejudices. Back then, we couldn’t conceive of how an attractive, reasonably intelligent woman with even a modicum of self regard could choose to be with him. That she confined herself to the Trump Tower penthouse, like some Slovenian Rapunzel; that she seemed to recoil in his presence; that she sat out so many events—and was even rumored to swap in a “Fake Melania” body double from time to time—only reinforced the prevailing belief that she was being held against her will. FREE MELANIA, the signs of protest read—as if the former Melanija Knavs wasn’t exactly where she wanted to be.

I have not been immune to this “Melania projection.” Even now, after all that’s happened, and all we’ve learned about her character, it’s hard not to project my own sensibilities onto her. I mean, Melania is part of my generational cohort. She’s not much older than me, a few months younger than my wife. Barron was born on March 20, 2006—a year and change after our first kid, five months before our second.

Plus, we tread the same Manhattan streets. Our common ground really was common ground! Not only did Melania move to New York around the same time that I did, but she occupied the same spaces in New York that I did. The apartment where she lived in 1996, the one at Zeckendorf Towers that her friend the Milanese playboy and modeling agent Paolo Zampolli found for her, was in Union Square, home to the now-defunct 119 Bar, one of my favorite old haunts. Had she ever popped in there for a (non-alcoholic, for her) drink, slid into one of the battered red vinyl booths? Probably she’d been to Bar Six—another of my go-to watering holes, on account of its location across the street from my friend Keri’s Sixth Avenue sublet;⁶ there were always aspiring models hanging out in there, sipping well vodka on the rocks, smoking Camel Lights, self-consciously checking their reflections in the mirrors that hung on every wall. And if Melania was a fixture at Moomba—then a hip nightclub, and reportedly the site of her first date with Donald—might she have also patronized Nell’s, a similar establishment, where my friend Chris and I used to go on Tuesday nights? (Keri worked there, so we were able to both jump the line and get in for free.) Later that decade, Melania lived on 30th and Park Avenue, a short stroll from my studio apartment on 28th and Lexington.⁷ Did she ever grab Indian takeout from Curry in a Hurry? Or a slice from the pizzeria across the street, with its delicious sausage rolls, where one afternoon I walked in on what appeared to be an Albanian mob sit-down?⁸

Could a fellow Gen X-er from that dearly departed Manhattan, my bygone New York, be that much different than me?

And so I’ve given Melania a pass. To the best of my recollection, in my nine years on the Trump/Russia beat, I’ve never once written about the third Mrs. Trump. To me, she seemed irrelevant, dull, an afterthought, and not worth the effort of digging into. My attitude towards Melania could be summed up in five words: I don’t care, do you?

But now, in the first year of the Trump Redux, I fear that, like many others before me, I may have underestimated Melania Trump. Because the thing about ghosts is, they’re always hanging around. Save for a brief period in 2000, when Donald gallantly dumped her to sow his wild oats for a few months, she has been a constant in his life for 27 years. She’s not always in the thick of things, but she’s never far away from the action. And he seems to genuinely value her opinion and her support.

Now she is, once again, First Lady—a largely ceremonial position that nonetheless carries weight. And if the United States descends into a monarchy, as Curtis Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment crew yearn for, Melania is poised to be not just the Queen of America, but the mother of the heir apparent.⁹ Anyone familiar with the history of the Roman Empire Yarvin et alia so admire knows how much power such a figure can wield.¹⁰

Not that Melania isn’t powerful already. Consider: Would Donald have defeated Hillary in 2016 without her help? Her official statement after the release of the Access Hollywood tape gave those inclined to forgive Trump an excuse to do so: “The words my husband used are unacceptable and offensive to me. This does not represent the man that I know. He has the heart and mind of a leader. I hope people will accept his apology, as I have, and focus on the important issues facing our nation and the world.”

And her subsequent appearance on Anderson Cooper, as related by Mary Jordan in The Art of Her Deal, probably sealed the deal:

Sitting very straight, wearing a white dress with a high collar, her hands folded on her lap, Melania looked directly at [Cooper]. “I’m great. I’m very strong. I’m very confident. And I live my life.” She would not describe the conversation with her husband, saying, “When we talk in private, I will keep it private.” She said that her husband had apologized to her—and that it should be good enough for everybody else. “I accept his apology. I hope the American people will accept it [as] well.”

She added, “My husband is real. He’s raw. He tells it as it is. He’s kind. He’s a gentleman.” At another point, she added, “People think and talk about me, the—like, ‘Oh, Melania, oh, poor Melania.’ Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t feel sorry for me. I can handle everything.” She said that she had seen people on television who “think they are celebrities” criticizing her and suggesting others should feel sorry for her. “I would suggest to them to look themselves in the mirror and to look at their actions and to take care of their own families,” she said. . . .

Her choice in that moment was to back up her husband. She painted Trump as the victim of a conspiracy of “left-wing media” and attacks “organized from the opposition,” including the Clintons. She dismissed his statements as “boy talk” and said he had been “egged on” by Billy Bush to “say dirty and bad stuff.” She echoed what the Trump campaign was stressing: Donald Trump is a great promoter of women. “He supports everybody. He supports women. He encourages them to go to the highest level, to achieve their dreams, to—employs many, many women.” Then she tried to lighten the conversation by saying, “I have two boys at home. I have my young son and I have my husband.”

Melania is not the first humiliated wife to “stand by her man.” But given the disgusting footage of Donald’s braggadocio with Billy Bush combined with his vile history of (both alleged and adjudicated) sexual assaults, her appearance that night on CNN—elegant, defiantly loyal, no bullshit, and, in marked contrast to her philistine husband, classy—certainly helped the cause. One could reasonably argue, as Jordan makes the case for in her book, that Melania’s deft handling of the Access Hollywood crisis won Donald the election. That’s not insignificant.

A lot of Melania’s backstory remains shrouded in secrecy. This is by design. My friend Nina Burleigh, who spent time in Slovenia researching the “Melanija Knavs” chapter in The Trump Women: Part of the Deal, wrote in her book about the difficulty of gathering information on this elusive subject:

The Knavses have, in any event, been a fairly secretive little clan. Melania apparently stopped communicating with her Slovenian friends after she moved to Milan. A few months before she became first lady, she hired a lawyer there—who now monitors uses of her name and keeps track of the inquiries of local and foreign journalists, and old friends who would talk to the media about her past. A close family friend was afraid to communicate with journalists after appearing in a POP TV documentary in 2017 and backed out of an appointment with me minutes before our planned meeting.

In a must-read post this week about Melania and Epstein at American Freakshow, Nina supplied more detail:

Anyone who has tried to learn what Melania Knauss was up to in the years between leaving Slovenia around 1990 and washing up in New York City a few years before she says she met Trump in 1998, finds a lacuna, a blank slate on which there is almost no record. . . . I went to Slovenia, found a few sources who talked, and much fear, including in a powerful businessman who told me he was backing out of talking to me about Melania’s father’s legal problems after he was visited in his office by thuggish men in business suits.

Mary Jordan was even more blunt:

Finding out more about Melania—her past, her motivations, her daily life—has been an unprecedented challenge. In three decades as a correspondent working all over the world, I have often written about the reluctant and the reclusive, including the head of a Mexican drug cartel and a Japanese princess, but nothing compared to trying to understand Melania. Most people I spoke to would not speak on the record. Many in the Trump world are governed by NDAs (nondisclosure agreements). Some had been warned by lawyers, family members, and others close to Melania not to speak publicly about her, and many would talk only on the same encrypted phone apps used by spies and others in the intelligence community. Old photos that were once an easy Google search away no longer pop up online.

Like her husband, Melania is litigious—in Slovenia and in the United States. In her memoir, which is not terribly long, she invests several pages in detailing the successful legal actions she took against the Daily Mail for publishing “an article sourced from a ‘journalist’ in Slovenia alleging that I had worked as an escort before meeting my husband.” She also sued a blogger from Maryland for circulating the same “baseless claims.” In the book, she doesn’t deign to name the Slovenian journalist or the Maryland blogger, writing:

Eventually, all three cases concluded in my favor, with the Daily Mail issuing a formal apology and agreeing to pay damages, stating, “We accept that these allegations about Mrs. Trump are not true and we retract and withdraw them.” Similarly, the blogger also apologized, admitting, “I had no legitimate factual basis to make these false statements and I fully retract them. I acknowledge that these false statements were very harmful and hurtful to Mrs. Trump and her family, and therefore I sincerely apologize to Mrs. Trump, her son, her husband, and her parents for making these false statements.”

The point of my lawsuits wasn’t the damages I eventually collected, but rather about holding individuals to a standard where lying is not acceptable.

If the purpose here is to refute the “baseless claim” that Melania “worked as an escort before meeting [her] husband,” as she writes in Melania, does she think that winning a settlement in a lawsuit makes that case more strongly than, oh I don’t know, providing more details about what she was doing in Milan and Paris from 1991-1996? It’s a memoir, after all; the purpose of a memoir is to spill the tea, not to copy-paste press releases. We already knew plenty about her wedding (and, frankly, who cares); what we don’t know much about is what she was up to during the aforementioned half decade. In Melania, we get ten short, platitudinous paragraphs about her years in Milan, and about her time in Paris, five measly sentences of fluff.

So I didn’t learn much from Melania’s account of the author’s early modeling days—but I did find out exactly what befell those writers who jumped to defamatory conclusions. (And let me be perfectly clear: I’m not implying anything untoward, illicit, or in any way pejorative! I’m just asking questions!) I don’t begrudge Melania for filing the lawsuits; I’ve been slandered before, and it sucks. But why include the full statements of apology in your memoir, if not as a veiled threat? And why the threats (both legal and “thuggish men in business suits”), and why the secrecy, if there’s nothing to hide? (One more time, for the legal team in Ljubljana: I’m not insinuating anything untoward, illicit, or in any way pejorative! I’m just asking questions! Umakni se!)

“As a private person who has often been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation, I feel a responsibility to set the record straight and to provide the actual account of my experiences,” Melania writes in her “Author’s Note.” A worthy endeavor—but unfortunately, she fails to do so. This was her chance to “set the record straight” on those spotty years, and she blew it; I’m more curious about her time in Milan and Paris now than I was before I read her memoir.

Putting aside her (ridiculous, given her husband) assertion about lying being unacceptable, I understand Melania’s desire for privacy. When she married Donald Trump, she knew she’d be in the public eye, but she had no idea she’d be First Lady—let alone twice!—and thus subject to this level of scrutiny. So I have some sympathy for her in this regard. I value my privacy, too, and I would feel the same way.

But the fact remains that Melania is once again First Lady. Not only that, but her husband is a hateful fascist who constitutes the gravest threat to the Union since the Civil War—and, if he gets his way, will end democracy in the United States, full stop. He’s building concentration camps and kidnapping legal residents and ordering the DOJ to investigate his enemies. It’s scary stuff, straight from the Nazi playbook.

Melania appears to have some influence on Donald, which, if properly cultivated, might be wielded to help save the American experiment. But is she also a fascist? It’s one of a great many things about her—too many—that we don’t definitively know.

At the top of the list: What was her relationship like with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell? Melania has been with Donald since 1998; Trump didn’t break with Epstein until late 2004. She’s front and center in the most widely circulated photo of Donald, Jeffrey, and Ghislaine. Epstein told the journalist Michael Wolff that he was Trump’s closest friend for ten years and that “the first time [Donald] slept with [Melania] was on my plane.” If true—and I’m not inclined to believe a word that came out of that self-aggrandizing monster’s mouth, but he did make the claim—that suggests a level of comfort between Melania and Epstein. How well did she know him? When did they meet? Why would Epstein have claimed that he introduced Donald to Melania, if the couple met via Paolo Zampolli? Did she spend time at his house in Palm Beach or his mansion in New York? Was she ever with Epstein and/or Maxwell without her husband? Was she asked to do stuff? Did she have any interaction at all with the girls on Epstein’s properties? Was she aware of Epstein’s pedophiliac predilections? Was it possible for her not to be aware, given Donald’s 2002 “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side” quote in New York magazine? If so, why didn’t she do anything about it? Virginia Guiffre was working at the spa at Mar-a-Lago when Ghislaine Maxwell “recruited” her in 2000, shortly after Melania was photographed at a tennis-tournament party there with Trump, Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew; was Melania aware of that? Did she know Virginia in 2000? Did she encounter Virginia subsequent to her leaving Mar-a-Lago?

Is she in the Epstein files?

Under the circumstances, these are reasonable questions to ask. Journalists should ask them. Congress should ask them. Attorneys should ask them. The First Lady isn’t exempt from scrutiny because she happens to be married to the POTUS. After all, Melania Trump and her husband were cavorting, for years, with the two most notorious child sex traffickers in recent history, who also have deep connections to foreign intelligence services. Their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell is not just a matter of curiosity; it’s a matter of national security.

Let Melania speak. And this time, I’d like to hear more than “It’s so cute. It’s really good.”

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First Lady Melania Trump listens to President Donald J. Trump give remarks during a dinner in celebration of evangelical leadership in the State Dining Room of the White House | August 27, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)

1. Not all models are supermodels, just as not all actors in adult films are porn stars.

2. Not counting when she added the “S” to KNAUS to get KNAUSS.

3. A literal enigma, and not an anagram of “gamine.”

4. This sounds like a compliment until you remember that the most famous human of the 20th century was Adolf Hitler.

5. It’s wild that two of the most famous people in the U.S. are from Slovenia: Melania and Luka Dončić, star of the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers.

6. Not her real name.

7. My monthly rent for that studio apartment in 1998 was something like $1,400, which I could barely afford; unless she scored some sort of sweet sublet, her “one-bedroom on the third floor of a historic brownstone building near 30th Street and Park Avenue,” as she describes it in Melania, had to have been closer to $2k a month—a fortune in those days.

8. As an Italian it pains me to admit it, but all the best pizzerias in NYC, and Hoboken too, are Albanian.

9. Apologies to Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric.

10. Julia Domna FTW!