by Kate Bennett
Melania had done the shoot in 1996, and the images had run in a French magazine in 1997. “Melania was super-great and a fantastic personality and she was very kind with me,” the photographer, a bon vivant with a lean photography résumé named Jarl Alexandre Alé de Basseville, said. He added he was “celebrating the female form” when he took the shots, as male photographers who take naked pictures of up-and-coming models and starlets often do. Alé de Basseville would do time in federal prison for money laundering in 2007.
The shoot happened shortly after Melania arrived in New York, when work was scarce. More models do nude shoots than don’t, especially ones trying to break into the industry, and while the shame and secrecy attached to those I-did-what-I-had-to-do photos isn’t as intense as it used to be (remember former Miss America Vanessa Williams?), Melania Trump isn’t necessarily a woman the current feminist brigade gets jazzed to rally behind.
That these images existed wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but the rumors of who leaked them was. There remains to this day a strong indication that it was Trump himself who tipped off the New York Post to the photos, using his longtime friend Roger Stone to deliver the goods. (As of this writing, Stone is currently awaiting trial, scheduled for November 2019, on charges of lying to Congress, obstruction, and witness tampering by the Department of Justice.) The theory goes that Trump was trying to head off a bad week on the campaign. He was embroiled in a nasty public battle with the Gold Star parents of fallen army captain Humayun Khan. So he did what he often does when he wants the conversation to switch to something else: he throws out something new to the media and sits back and watches as it does the trick.
But this time, the idea that he would throw his naked wife under the bus was almost so gross and salacious, and the photos so B-movie bad, the press ultimately spent very little time discussing them. Melania has not commented on how she thinks they got into the hands of the tabloid and onto the cover, but friends say she still refuses to believe Trump would do that to her. As for Stone, she’s not so sure.
Trump, who has a long history of wanting everyone else to appreciate the beauty of the women he is with, responded to the photos saying, “Melania was one of the most successful models and she did many photo shoots, including covers and major magazines. This was a picture taken for a European magazine prior to my knowing Melania. In Europe, pictures like this are very fashionable and common.” That last part, at least, is true.
The very next day, Monday, August 1, the Post dropped more pictures from the same shoot; this time the photos of Melania, again naked, showed her locked in an embrace with another naked model, a woman named Emma Eriksson. “Menage a Trump,” screamed the headline.
Oddly, though, the photos sort of tanked. In the whirl of an already nasty campaign getting nastier by the day, somehow the public didn’t feel like piling on by making fun of Melania Trump. Instead, many felt sorry for her. Liberals and feminists had a difficult time bashing a woman whose nakedness was being shamed on the cover of newspapers. Doing so felt dirty. It fell once again to Jason Miller to spin away the bad news about Melania, just as he had during the uproar over her plagiarized convention speech. But he didn’t have to say all that much because photos from twenty years ago were much more forgivable than copying and pasting words Michelle Obama spoke about her husband.
“They’re a celebration of the human body as art. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about with the pictures,” Miller said on CNN, sounding a lot like the photographer who took them. “She’s a beautiful woman.”
A year before the photos came out, Barbara Walters asked Melania in an interview if her modeling photos—the ones of her naked on a rug in British GQ, for example—were too hot for the American public to handle for their first lady. “I don’t think so,” Melania answered. “I think people will always judge. Maybe they will say, oh, the past that you have, the way you were modeling…” She trailed off before adding that she was just doing a job.
The naked photos, however, were too much for her to explain away. Instead, humiliated, defeated, embarrassed, and scared for her young son, she all but disappeared for much of the fall, emerging only at the end of September to sit in the audience as Trump debated Hillary Clinton in upstate New York.
Then came Access Hollywood, and the dam broke.
3
The Tape
“I’m not a ‘yes’ person. I’m ‘yes,’ or I’m ‘no.’ But I’m not easily a ‘yes’ person.”
—MELANIA TRUMP
Not even seventy-two hours after the biggest scandal of Trump’s campaign broke—his leaked private conversation with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about being able to “grab [women] by the pussy”—Melania showed up to his debate with Hillary Clinton in St. Louis, Missouri, in a hot pink blouse, the necktie of which was styled in the fashion commonly referred to as a “pussy bow.” The term dates to the 1930s, when fashionable women would sometimes tie an elaborate, showy bow around their neck, snuggled up tight to their chins, in the fashion of a fancy cat wearing a bow.
The Internet went wild.
What Melania had done was wear something in her first public appearance since the infamous Access Hollywood tape that made people question exactly what she was thinking—a tactic she would later use to great effect when she became first lady. That Was she or wasn’t she? kept people guessing. Was she wearing a pussy bow because Trump had said “pussy”?
Just as Melania started to step back out on the trail after the RNC speech debacle, David Fahrenthold, a Washington Post reporter, broke the story, getting his hands on a clip from a hot mic during the interview Trump did in September 2005 with Bush, then host of the entertainment program.
The content was beyond lewd: it was grotesque and horribly offensive. With no cameras on him, only a microphone turned on, Trump starts talking to Bush about a married woman he thought was good-looking, which didn’t prevent Trump from taking a stab at trying to sleep with her.
“I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says. “Then all of a sudden, I see her. She’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”
He and Bush chuckled back and forth, Trump saying how hot the woman in the soap opera scene he was about to tape was.
“I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump, who had married Melania eight months earlier, says. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” And then, the coda: “And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.” “Whatever you want,” says Bush. “Grab ’em by the pussy,” Trump says.
It was that last part that sounded the alarm, that went beyond bawdy talk and into sexual assault territory. It would become a rallying cry for women, both those for and against Trump, and a weapon used by his critics and political opponents.
The tape came out so close to the election that Trump’s allies were calling the campaign, telling aides Trump would have to drop out, that it was all over. He was dead on arrival.
Melania was livid. By this point in her marriage, she was less concerned that her husband had an imperfect track record of fidelity and more worried the stories of his behavior, like this one, would get out. She was also furious that all she had sacrificed—her privacy, her schedule, time with Barron, her dignity following the leak of old nude photos, and the RNC speech scandal—would now possibly be for nothing. Some dumb, disgusting conversation could take it all down.
The timing of when Trump recorded the interview was also part of her anger and humiliation. In August 2005, just weeks before he said what he said to Bush, she had told Trump that she was pregnant.
Just as she would do when the story about Stormy Daniels broke months later, Melania went cold, telling him, “You’re on your own with this one.” As she has often said, he is an adult, he makes his own choices, and he knows the consequenc
es. This was no different.
The worst thing Melania can do to her husband is ice him out, ignore him when the chips are down. Melania was Trump’s truth touchstone, and she now had zero desire to throw him a lifeline—and he was drowning. She remained unconcerned with rushing to his side or telling him not to worry, which was all he wanted his wife to do.
“Remember,” says someone who knows Melania’s thinking, “she grew up under communism, a good environment to learn both survival and resistance.”
Melania’s frosty public demeanor, the unsmiling pout, the icy stare at cameras, was nothing compared with her expression of anger in private. She’s not a crier, says a friend, and she doesn’t lock herself in a room and sob and scream. Instead, she gets aloof, distant, punishingly stoic. With Ivana, Trump’s first wife, there would be fights. With Marla, his second, drama. But with Melania, since conflict was rare, the sting was in the haughtiness of her judgment.
In a knee-jerk response to the disclosure of the Access Hollywood tape, Trump, as he tends to do, made it worse, telling the New York Post, “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course—not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.” I wondered if “anyone” included his wife, who most definitely was.
By midnight, Trump sent out a videotaped apology, which started off better. “I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not. I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video are one of them. Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am.” But it ended back on Clinton, an attempt to point the conversation elsewhere. “I’ve said some foolish things, but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed, and intimidated his victims,” Trump said. “We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.”
Melania, silent on the sidelines, avoided the compulsory crisis control. She didn’t leap to his side. Instead, she let Trump sweat it for almost another full day before she did the least she could do.
“The words my husband used are unacceptable and offensive to me,” she said in a statement released to the media. “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.”
Melania had been listening to Trump’s aides go back and forth about what to do with the mess, but she didn’t say much. Outsiders’ opinions weren’t important to her; she only trusted her instincts. She agreed to go ahead with the statement only after saying she would not sit with Trump for a taped apology on national television. Says an aide who was around at the time, the public ritual of the wife sitting next to her husband, possibly even holding his hand, wasn’t going to go down on Melania’s watch. To engage in such a ritual in the heat of her humiliation and ire at the whole episode would require her to be inauthentic. Her critics might want to take a minute and think about how rare it is in this day and age for the wife of a politician not to perform the ritual. Remember Silda Spitzer, after the then–New York governor Eliot Spitzer got busted for using prostitutes? There she was, quietly and uncomfortably standing beside him as he resigned, admitting to being, basically, a philandering john. (They divorced five years later.) Or Dina Matos McGreevey, wife of the former governor of New Jersey Jim McGreevey, who stood next to her husband wearing a light blue St. John suit and pearls while he announced not only that he had been unfaithful but also that he was gay. (They separated a few weeks later.) Or Wendy Vitter, wife of Louisiana senator David Vitter; Wendy stood beside him as he talked about “past failings” in their marriage. Vitter’s number had been found in the Rolodex of “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Or Terry Mahoney, wife of Florida congressman Tim Mahoney, who was by her husband’s side when he held a press conference admitting to two affairs, one with a former staffer whom he paid more than $100,000 in the hopes of buying her silence. (A week after the public show of solidarity, Terry filed for divorce.) Or even one of the original political spouses to demonstrate a show of force: Hillary Clinton. Who can forget 1992, when Hillary Clinton leaned in to 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft to tell the world she was never (probably ever) going to not support her husband, Bill Clinton, no matter what women like Gennifer Flowers, who was claiming a twelve-year affair with Clinton, said. “You know, I’m not sittin’ here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” said Clinton, who definitely was doing just that. “I’m sittin’ here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together.” Less than three years later, President Clinton would be embroiled in a sex scandal with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
There’s something to be said for Melania’s not doing the doe-eyed stare at Trump’s side, especially considering the precedent of beleaguered spouses who opted to do so, or were told they had to.
Melania said okay to the press statement only after Trump had aired his public apology video. Notably, the only emotion the statement revealed is that she found the words he used unacceptable. “I hope people will accept his apology” was also weak sauce. She might as well have been saying she hopes people forgive him for not taking out the trash. There was no beg, no “please,” no counterexample of a time he was kind to her, no hint at any personal conversation between the two beyond “he said he was sorry.” Bare bones, at best.
But she knew he wouldn’t drop out of the presidential race, so she had to do something; otherwise, everywhere she went from that day until Election Day, she would be hounded with questions about how she felt—which she hates. She also knew the women of the Trump base would like her more for not ditching him completely and for not forcing a fake, hand-holding interview (a la that Bill and Hillary Clinton 60 Minutes interview, where Hillary did the heavy lifting, fixing a problem with superglue to which Bill himself could only apply a Band-Aid—she saved his bacon).
For Melania, the optics weren’t as clear. She wore the pink Gucci pussy bow blouse to the next debate, sure, but no one really knows whether she did so to downplay the issue of his using the word, making light of it and thinking the whole thing silly, or whether she did so to signal to women that she, too, was offended by her husband’s disgusting choice of words. I initially thought Melania wasn’t that cunning (or conniving) to subliminally message either support for or opposition to her husband’s reference to grabbing women’s pussies. I honestly thought she was just wearing it to wear it. I have since changed my mind. I’ve observed the many times she has used her outfits as messaging. I don’t think she selected the $1,100 Gucci shirt (and matching hot pink pants) by accident. I think she meant to wear the hell out of that outfit.
I also think she wanted it to land in that gray area between Trump supporters thinking she’s on the side of her husband and anti-Trumpers thinking she’s sending them a silent signal acknowledging their rage. She bought the shirt from the online retailer Net-a-Porter, where she prefers to do her own shopping, and the description of the blouse on the site reads, “Pussy-bow silk crepe de chine shirt.” The word was right there. There were think pieces about that shirt and what it might mean. Vogue even did an entire slideshow about the pussy bow throughout history; more than two years later, people still wonder whether it was a hot pink middle finger to the people who attacked her husband for making the tape or to her husband for making it.
A campaign spokeswoman said the shirt was not intentional.
Ten days after the Access story broke, and with three weeks to go before Election Day, Melania finally talked about how she felt. Speaking to Anderson Cooper from the living room of her Trump Tower penthouse, Melania said she was “surprised” by the talk on that tape because that isn’t the Donald Trump she knows. Looking rigid and forcing a smile, a very un-Mela
nia shimmer of perspiration on her forehead, she went on to describe it as “boy talk” and said it was Bush who had egged Trump on to say “the dirty and bad stuff.” She was exonerating Trump.
“I’ve heard many different stuff, boys talk,” she goes on, “the boys, the way they talk when they grow up and they wanna, ah, sometimes show each other, oh, this and that, and talking about the girls. But, yeah, I was surprised, of course.” Melania was saying that she wasn’t offended in general by the way boys can brag and embellish stories about girls—she wasn’t a prude—but she wasn’t going to sit there and say she expected the worst parts of her husband’s crude attitude to be aired in public.
“People, they don’t really know me,” Melania told Cooper, acknowledging that she understood well the consequences of her absence from the spotlight. “People think and talk about me like, ‘Oh, poor Melania.’” Then she said something that, for me at least, stuck: “Don’t feel sorry for me. I can handle everything.” I’ve thought about this statement a great deal since.
Melania showed up to the final debate between her husband and Hillary Clinton, in Las Vegas, wearing a sleek, sleeveless black Ralph Lauren Collection jumpsuit—which had a tie at the neck that some people said was another pussy bow, but it wasn’t really. (Sometimes a bow is just a bow.)
Melania would make a few more appearances before the election, but she didn’t follow through on the “three or four big speeches” Trump had promised his wife would deliver during a TV interview with George Stephanopoulos. One would think that Trump would understand it’s futile to promise a Melania appearance unless Melania has decided to appear.
The most potent, and perhaps poignant, speech Melania delivered during the campaign, post Access, happened on November 3, five days before the election, in tiny Berwyn, Pennsylvania, a Main Line suburb outside Philadelphia. It was a last-ditch effort to boost women voters and get them to the polls. Melania was introduced by Karen Pence, a prickly woman who hadn’t made many friends within Trump circles. Melania and Karen could not be more different. They were total opposites. Karen was “often,” say aides, suspicious, judgmental, and universally critical. Everyone around her and Mike Pence made Karen suspect an ulterior motive. And she was particularly suspicious of the tall Slovenian model who had posed in her birthday suit. To put it mildly, the two women never clicked, says someone who was on the campaign.