The simple fact of the matter was they did not much like each other. Everything they each were individually, the other wanted the opposite. They had nothing in common, apart from their daughter. But the ultimate undoing of their marriage, as with all things related to Donald, came down to money. A few years into his marriage to Marla, Donald finally had some. By the mid-1990s, as Donald neared his fiftieth birthday, the “Trump is back” storyline started permeating newspapers and magazines. Forbes once again put him on its list of the 400 richest Americans in 1996, ranking at no. 376. (He insisted that he was owed a position much higher up on the list, claiming that the $450 million that the magazine had estimated was about one-eighth of what he was actually worth.)
The remainder of the Welcome Back Donald stories were prompted in large part by the windfall Donald got from selling his interest in the Grand Hyatt Hotel—his first big splash in Manhattan, and the deal he had rushed back from his honeymoon with Ivana to close—to his business partners, the Pritzker family. The vast majority of what the Pritzkers paid him went to people he owed and toward various commissions, but he nevertheless walked away with about $25 million.
It was a novelty for Donald. He could tuck himself in his oversize bed in his Trump Tower triplex and doze off without the thought of creditors and debts and all the financial mires that had encumbered him year after year. Something else started weighing on him. The prenuptial agreement he’d convinced Marla to sign in 1993 guaranteed her somewhere in the range of $1 million to $5 million if they were to split up before their fifth wedding anniversary. After that, it would balloon into a sum many, many times that. The fixed amount that accounted for a portion of his fortune could become a large chunk of what he’d just got back.
Once again, Donald got lucky with the timing of his marriage unraveling. With Ivana, the conflict in Aspen had unfolded when he was broke enough that Ivana couldn’t push for more than she’d agreed to in their prenup; and now he was fed up with Marla just a few months before the milestone that would guarantee her much more of what he had. “I remember him pulling me aside in the lobby of Trump Tower one day and telling me all these reasons he was considering filing for divorce,” one friend recalled, “and I just looked him dead in the eye and told him to cut the crap. I knew it was about the money, and he knew he couldn’t hide it from me. I just reminded him that he should do what he wanted, but he needed to do it with a little dignity this time.”
Marla had an idea of what was coming, though she tried to hide it as long as she could. She had just gotten off the wild ride that is a Trump divorce. She knew full well what she was about to face, and if she could head it off, she would. At the end of April 1997, Marla and her mother Ann and a three-year-old Tiffany traveled back down to Dalton for a celebration in honor of her hometown’s 150th birthday. Speaking at the bridge club in town, Marla brushed off her husband’s obvious absence from the event. “He works all the time,” she said, smiling at the curious women she’d left behind to live in that gilded triplex and sweeping oceanfront mansion. “That man!”
Less than a week later, she and Donald released a joint statement announcing their separation. “After a 31/2-year marriage, we have decided to separate, as friends,” the statement read. “For the sake of our family, we ask that the members of the media will accept this statement, respect our privacy and move on to coverage of more important issues.” The sentiment from a man who dipped his bride-to-be nearly a half dozen times in front of a hundred flashbulbs at their wedding, who phoned in stories to court the press after his first divorce, dripped with irony. Although paparazzi started to stake out some of the exits in Trump Tower and flew helicopters over Mar-a-Lago, the coverage paled in comparison to that of divorce number one. Outwardly, there was no one other woman or man in the picture, which made this separation far less delicious for gossip columnists from the get-go. There was no trail of affair bread crumbs for them to follow, and no months of whispers about a looming split, either. “I hadn’t heard any rumors of a breakup,” said Liz Smith, who chronicled Donald’s split with Ivana down to the second. “I wish I had. It’s a great story.”
Inherently, though, a second divorce is less great a story than a first, even if this particular second marriage was recorded as if it were a sordid royal courtship. The Trumps may have dominated headlines for weeks and months straight in the early 1990s, but no one is particularly shocked when the quintessential Other Woman becomes just another woman in Donald Trump’s storied history of them. Stern called it, on their wedding night, no less. This relationship always had a shelf life. But with a young child in the picture, no one really reveled in the I-told-you-so and karmic retribution of it all, either.
This did not mean that the tabloids didn’t extract whatever juice they could out of the split. “Donald wants out. He’s looking for his freedom,” the Post reported. “Marla’s Beverly Hillbillies’ family drove Donald crazy,” one source told the paper. Another suggested that the whole breakup was all a ploy to get more eyeballs to tune in to the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned and was scheduled to air two weeks after the announcement. It took only a few days for the papers to cast new leads in Donald’s romantic melodrama—including Dr. Ginger Southall, the Mar-a-Lago staff chiropractor he’d lauded for her fictitious degree from the Baywatch Medical School. “I’ve heard Sharon Stone’s name mentioned,” he boasted to friends of the rumors. “I have heard Princess Di! It’s wild!”
Like Ivana, Marla initially contested the prenup she’d begrudgingly signed to quash “the little fear monster” keeping Donald from agreeing to “the M word.” She claimed she agreed to it under duress and extreme pressure, and it went against all the things her husband promised to provide her and her daughter in their three-odd years of marriage. Neither Marla nor Donald showed up to the Manhattan Supreme Court hearing on July 8 of 1999—two years into a legal tug-of-war between the two sides. Trump’s attorney had called the agreement iron-clad, and contended that Marla knew exactly what she was giving away and getting herself into when she signed it. Marla disagreed. “After giving Donald two years to honor the verbal commitments he made to me during our 12-year relationship, I decided to walk away completely under the terms of our prenuptial agreement that had been placed before me just five days before our 1993 wedding,” she said in a statement. She was in Los Angeles at the time, once again auditioning all over town to land herself an acting gig. What she got after two years of fighting was something close to a reported $2 million, along with more support to take care of Tiffany. It wasn’t nearly enough to keep up the lifestyle she and her five-year-old had grown accustomed to. The way he saw it, that wasn’t Donald’s problem. In a statement of his own, he said that he was happy that the split worked out “so amicably” and that he wishes his now ex-wife well.
Those well-wishes came ten months after Donald Trump spotted a twenty-eight-year-old Slovenian model in a Midtown nightclub, whom he quickly turned into what his friends considered “the next hot flavor of the month.” Donald had already been dating twentysomething models and socialites about town for months, barely taking a breather following his initial separation from Marla. He took out model Kara Young for a time. Norwegian cosmetics heiress Celina Midelfart made the rounds with him, as well. She turned up with him to the Kit Kat Club—a joint on Forty-Third Street named after the club in the musical Cabaret—one night in September of 1998. It was the middle of fashion week, which meant the club was flush with more models than usual. Among them was Melania Knauss, who’d moved to New York two years earlier from Milan to see if she could make more money doing commercial work. Paolo Zampolli, an Italian-born businessman who owned ID Models at the time, met her at a casting call years earlier and secured an H-1B visa for her, typically reserved for high-skilled workers like engineers and computer whizzes with advanced degrees but sometimes copped by models who have not even graduated from high school, let alone college. (On the campaign trail, Donald would deride the use of such visas, calling out “ramp
ant, widespread H-1B abuse,” saying that they are for “temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay.”) She moved into an apartment in the Zeckendorf Towers near Union Square, with a roommate and rent mostly footed by her agency, but work wasn’t as easy to come by as Zampolli made it seem. She’d found more success in Paris and Milan before she moved to New York. In Manhattan, models a decade younger beat her out for the tobacco and alcohol ads she got called in for. She found some jobs doing ads for a watch company, some lingerie shoots, a Panasonic spot that aired on TV, and a billboard for Camel, which got mounted in the middle of Times Square, not far from the Kit Kat Club.
Melania was toying with the idea of moving back to Europe as her bank account tipped toward empty when she went out in Midtown that September evening, which she typically did not do. Usually she went to the movies or to the gym. Sometimes, she’d spend an evening sewing clothes for herself in her apartment. She’d always been somewhat hermetic and studious growing up. She was born in Novo Mesto, what was then Yugoslavia, in 1970, and lived with her parents and sister in a Communist apartment block in the riverside town of Sevnica. The family had more than most. Her mother, Amalija, worked developing patterns at a textile factory, and her father, Viktor Knavs, a chauffeur for the mayor of a nearby town who later became a car salesman for a state-owned company (he allegedly was suspected of having evaded taxes when Melania was in elementary school, though his daughter has since denied the reports). When she was young, Viktor would spend weekends washing his antique Mercedes—a ritual he took great pleasure in—and Amalija would bring back fashion magazines from France and Germany, where she traveled for work, for her daughters to flip through. By the time Melania turned twenty-two, she landed herself in a Slovenian magazine as part of an annual Look of the Year contest. The magazine promised that the top three women would get contracts in cities across Europe. Melania was furious when she was named runner-up. She later claimed to have won the competition, a small white lie that became one of a number of fibs she told of her upbringing. She changed her name, of course, from Melanija Knavs to Melania Knauss; she dropped out of the University of Ljubljana to move to Milan to model after a year, though throughout the 2016 presidential campaign her website still claimed she’d graduated with a degree in design and architecture.
Despite the white lies, friends describe Melania as unfailingly sweet and unwilling to look for any kind of trouble. In an interview with author Charlotte Hays, one former model friend likened Melania to “strawberry ice cream.” “Sweet,” she said, “and smells nice.” She hardly dated, hardly went to bars or clubs, but Zampolli was throwing the Kit Kat Club party, and his parties were a thing of legend at that point. He’d bring in tiger cubs and fashion television cameras and, once, an alligator, and men like Donald Trump who’d come with one blonde and leave lusting after another. That night, when Midelfart got up to go to the ladies’ room, he moved toward Melania. “I went crazy,” he’d later tell Larry King in an interview about seeing her for the first time. “There was this great supermodel sitting next to Melania. I was supposed to meet the supermodel. But I said, ‘forget about her. What about the one to the left?’” The one to the left had a vague sense of who Donald was—he was rich and well known—but anyone with any sort of gut sense could tell that by looking at the way he carried himself. “I had my life. I had my world,” she later said of their introduction. “I didn’t follow Donald Trump and what kind of life he had.”
The legend they like to tell is that when Donald asked for Melania’s number, she suggested she take his instead. It was a test, she says. If he gave her his office line, she’d know it wasn’t for real. She had no interest in doing business with him, though ultimately that is what all of Donald’s relationships—romantic or otherwise—become, transactional. He gave her his office line, along with his home phone for the triplex and his number in Mar-a-Lago. Melania told friends she had no interest in Donald, especially knowing he’d cozied up to her after coming to the party with another woman. Zampolli’s girlfriend at the time, a Hungarian model who lived in the same apartment building as Melania, told reporters that she was “turned off” by the whole thing and that the idea of her friend actually calling Donald was “absolutely out of the question.”
She did call, though, after she went on a photo shoot in the Caribbean and came back to New York. Donald took her on a date to Moombah, the downtown club of the moment, and soon after, on his jet down to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. It didn’t take long for Donald to introduce her to his children, who were older now and less stung by this relationship than they had been with Marla. Melania hadn’t come between their parents, nor was she the first, second, or tenth pretty young thing they’d seen him with around town. “It was much more difficult getting along with my dad’s girlfriends when I was younger, because almost every woman who came into the house was somehow a challenge to me,” Ivanka admitted to gossip columnist Chaunce Hayden years later. That she and her brothers could see how plainly they were after her dad’s money also didn’t sit well, coupled with the fact that they tended to be half Donald’s age. “As long as his girlfriends never get any younger than my oldest brother, then it’s fine,” Ivanka joked in an interview with the Mail on Sunday, adding that with Don Jr. getting into his twenties at the time, “it’s starting to cut down his options.” The only thing that bothered her about her dad dating younger women was that she could so clearly see their intentions. “There was one girl he was seeing, and I knew she wasn’t a good person and was just after his money, so I said it to her face on several occasions,” she said in the interview, adding that she “managed to get rid of her,” though they still ran into one another because they were both modeling at the time.
Ivana didn’t worry about gold digging as much with Melania. She could tell she had “a good character,” and she’d known her father long enough now that she would have left if it were just about the money. “Dad’s too much of a pain in the ass to stick around with for too long if your motives aren’t genuine.” Plus, she added, “You can be a money-grabber at 45. So if that’s the real problem, then the age doesn’t matter.” Melania sat rows behind the children and Ivana in the Marble Collegiate Church when Donald’s father Fred passed away in June 1999, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani eulogized him, and the likes of Joan Rivers and Al D’Amato sat in the pews. Paparazzi caught Melania, in a low-cut lacy black slip dress barely covered up by a black cardigan and a silver cross around her neck, leaving the church alone. Marla did not attend the ceremony in the church in which she’d secretly meet Donald, with the reverend who’d married them half a dozen years earlier. Ten days after the funeral, their divorce was finalized.
That’s about the time that Donald started toying with the idea of running for president as a member of the Reform Party. It was serious enough that he let Chris Matthews interview him live in front of 1,200 students that November for an episode of Hardball taped at the University of Pennsylvania, where both men had spent their undergraduate years. Matthews opened with a question asking Donald what life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness meant to him. Donald immediately brought up people who were going to do great things in the world, and pointed to his own son, Don Jr., in the audience. Matthews urged him to tell his son to stand up for the cameras. “He’s much better looking than I am,” Donald joked.
Matthews mentioned that he had another special guest in the audience. “My supermodel,” Donald said, smiling. “Where is my supermodel? Melania. That’s Melania Knauss. Stand up,” he ordered. She did, cameras catching the whole thing.
“One thing that’s safe to say about you, Donald, is that you know the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia,” Matthews teased.
“I do,” Donald mused. “I do. Absolutely.”
As Donald mulled what came next for his political future, he nudged Melania forward in her career. He was keen on his girlfriend posing for a photo shoot in the January is
sue of British GQ—a special edition emblazoned “Naked supermodel special!” on its cover, alongside a cover line reading “Sex at 30,000 feet: Melania Knauss earns her air miles.” Donald lent them his Boeing jet, which was parked at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, for the shoot. The concept was to make Melania into a sort of Bond girl meets could-be First Lady. As the story accompanying the photos suggestively said, Melania is “an expert in the art of in-flight entertainment. And as his personal hostess, [she] might just end up as the next First Lady.” It continued: “Miss Knauss is relishing the prospect of a future pressing the flesh on state occasions. ‘I will put all my effort into it, and I will support my man.’”
Melania showed her support in the nude, or barely covered. In one photo, she splays out completely naked, apart from a diamond choker and thick diamond bangles on each wrist, on a tan fur blanket, where she is handcuffed to a locked briefcase. In another, she digs into the briefcase, which is filled with more diamond bracelets, spilling out of the gold sequined negligée that just barely remains tied on. In one shot she stands on the wing of the plane in a bright red python-print push-up bra, matching thong, and black knee-high boots, pointing both her bare backside and a silver pistol in the direction of the camera. She also posed sitting with her legs spread on the captain’s chair in the cockpit, a silver chain-linked body suit barely hiding her chest, but a silver headpiece covering most of her head. In all of the photos, what she lacks in clothing, she makes up for in avant-garde eyewear. It was not exactly a traditional spread for a potential First Lady, though it did presage the unconventional nature of the role she’d unwittingly fall into seventeen years later. Donald was not on set the day of the shoot, but he insisted on the photos being delivered to his office. The magazine framed the cover and a few other shots and sent them his way as quickly as it could.
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