After Donald Trump became president, his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, talked a lot about about how they put behind the pain caused by his affair with Marla Maples and their nasty 1990 divorce to become great friends in the last years of her life.
Ivana Trump, who died Thursday at age 73, also came forward in 2015 to deny that she ever accused Trump of raping her during their marriage. According to a Daily Beast story published after Trump announced he was running for president in 2015, Ivana made the assault allegations while giving a deposition during for their contentious divorce proceedings. But Ivana Trump said the story was “without merit” and she never meant the word “rape” to be taken literally, the New York Times reported.
“Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised three children that we love and are very proud of,” Ivana said in a statement to CNN in 2015. “I have nothing but fondness for Donald and wish him the best of luck on his campaign. Incidentally, I think he would make an incredible president.”
In announcing Ivana Trump’s death, the former president paid tribute to her on Truth Social, his social media platform. Ivana Trump was the first of his three wives and the mother of his three oldest children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.
“I am very saddened to inform all of those that loved her, of which there are many, that Ivana Trump has passed away at her home in New York City,” he wrote on Truth Social. “She was a wonderful, beautiful, and amazing woman, who led a great and inspirational life.”
The New York Police Department is investigating whether Ivana Trump fell down a flight of stairs in her four-story Upper East Side townhouse, the New York Times reported. The department received a 911 call at about 12:40 p.m. Thursday that she had been found unconscious, the Daily Beast said. “EMS responded to the location and pronounced the victim deceased at the scene,” an NYPD statement said. “There does not appear to be any criminality.”
The former model from Czechoslovakia and the brash New York-born real estate mogul were married for 14 years, starting in 1977. Together they became a New York City power couple and set the standard for the glitzed-up glamour and “greed is good” ethos of 1980s America. With her version of ’80s big hair, the famously blonde Ivana Trump also became an integral member of the Trump Organization, working as the vice president of interior design, and later as the president of Trump’s casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza hotel, Town and Country reported.
Ivana and Donald Trump raised their three children to become self-promoting celebrities and entrepreneurs like themselves. The siblings would eventually become vice presidents at the Trump Organization, join their father on his reality TV show, “The Apprentice” and become evangelists for his mission to reshape American politics.
Ivana Trump also supported her ex-husband’s political ambitions, telling the New York Post in 2016: “He’s a businessman. He knows how to talk. He can give an hour speech without notes … . He’s blunt.”
As is well known, the 1980s ended when the Trump marriage broke up in the most epic way possible.
As has become tabloid lore, Marla Maples, then Trump’s 26-year-old mistress, turned up in Aspen, Colo., while the entire family was on Christmas vacation in 1989. Trump had taken Ivana and his three children for a weeklong stay at one resort, then installed his mistress in a nearby penthouse.
A few days into the trip, Donald, Ivana, the children and Maples “all collided at a restaurant on the mountain,” according to The Atlantic. A screaming match broke out between the two women, during which Maples declared: “It’s out! It’s finally out!” The children — 11-year-old Donald Jr., 8-year-old Ivanka and 5-year-old Eric — sat silent.
Following the confrontation, reporters accosted Ivanka as she walked to school, and one asked whether Maples’ claims in a famous New York Post headline were true. The headline read: “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had.”
More lurid and disturbing details about the couple’s personal lives came out in their 1992 divorce proceedings and in Ivana Trump’s deposition, which the Daily Beast said was described in the 1993 book, “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.
The Daily Beast said the book painted a harrowing scene, allegedly sparked by Trump’s rage over a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, which was performed by a cosmetic surgeon Ivana Trump had previously used.
After Trump yelled that Ivana’s doctor “ruined me” he allegedly pulled fistfuls of hair from his wife’s scalp, then tore off her clothes and committed what the book described as “a violent assault.”
“According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me,’” the book’s author, journalist Harry Hurt III, wrote, according to the Daily Beast.
Trump denied the rape allegation in 1993, while also denying he had the scalp reduction surgery, the Daily Beast said. When the allegation resurfaced after Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, Trump’s attorney at the time, Michael Cohen, controversially told the Daily Beast, “You cannot rape your spouse. There’s very clear case law.”
Cohen also said that Ivana Trump was talking about how she “felt raped emotionally… . She was not referring to it (as) a criminal matter, and not in its literal sense, though there’s many literal senses to the word.”
Ivana Trump backed her ex-husband, saying that the comments attributed to her from nearly 30 years earlier came during “a time of very high tension during my divorce from Donald.”
Ivana Trump’s subsequent comments about Trump, before the election and after he won the presidency, tended to be about less volatile matters. Also known for her business savvy, Ivana Trump told the New York Post and CBS News in 2016 and 2017, respectively, that she and her ex-husband talked about about once a week and that he frequently asked for her feedback on his campaign appearances or how he should best use Twitter. She said he even floated the idea of nominating her to become the U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
“My ex said, ‘Ivana, if you want it, I’ll give it to you,’” Trump told the New York Post at a fashion show in September 2017. But she said she turned the job down, explaining, “It’s four years in Prague, so bye-bye to Miami, bye-bye to New York in spring and fall, bye-bye to Saint-Tropez in summer.”