Who is more attractive: Melania Trump or Stormy Daniels?
‘I now realize Melania is not a normal woman,’ writes her former friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff in her new book, a scathing portrait of the first lady and the Trump family.
When the world learned that President Donald Trump had allegedly slept with porn star Stormy Daniels in 2006, a few months after Melania Trump had given birth to their son, the first lady shrugged off the news.
“It’s just politics,” Melania Trump told her once-close friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, according to the new book, “Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady.” Winston Wolkoff, then working as the first lady’s unpaid White House adviser, had sent her a text, reading, “URGENT,” after the Wall Street Journal reported the alleged affair with Daniels.
“I was horrified by Stormy Daniels story,” wrote Winston Wolkoff, who had befriended Melania Trump in 2003 when she was just Donald Trump’s Slovenian-born, model girlfriend.
The story said that Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about the affair in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election. The “hush money” payment was made around the same time that the world heard Trump boasting about grabbing women by their genitals in the notorious “Access Hollywood” recording.
In Winston Wolkoff’s book, released Tuesday, she wrote that Melania Trump was similarly and strangely indifferent to Trump’s words on the “Access Hollywood” tape, which was recorded in 2005, soon after he married her.
Moreover, Melania Trump chose to offer a “non-response” to reporters’ questions about another woman, former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, who came forward in March 2018 to say that she, too, had an affair with Trump. McDougal told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she, like Daniels, had sex with Trump during the same July 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.
Winston Wolkoff wrote that Melania Trump clearly had no interest in “revealing her thoughts, feelings and perspectives about anything.” Still, Winston Wolkoff thought the first lady would at least reveal some kind of emotional response to a good friend who had been trusted to help organize her husband’s 2017 inauguration.
But Melania Trump kept up her breezy, emoji-filled texts to Winston Wolkoff and seemed to shrug it all off. Winston Wolkoff said her friend’s “nonresponse cast her as either a long-suffering victim of her unfaithful husband or a coldhearted gold digger.”
“I now realize Melania is not a normal woman,” Winston Wolkoff continued. “Two women had described having sex with her husband on national TV in graphic detail in the same week. Her private response: ‘It’s politics.’ Her public response: dead silence. It just wasn’t a human reaction.”
Winston Wolkoff probably shouldn’t have been surprised, given her description of Melania Trump’s near nonchalance to the Access Hollywood tape.
Its publication threatened to derail Trump’s candidacy, and left Winston Wolkoff feeling “sick trying to explain to my kids why Donald, not only the Republican nominee for president but my friend’s husband, a man they’d known their whole lives, had bragged about grabbing women’s private parts without their consent,” Winston Wolkoff wrote.
“I was concerned for Melania and worried about Barron, too,” she wrote.
When Winston Wolkoff texted Melania to ask if she was OK, the wife of the former reality TV star only texted back to ask about a lunch date. In the midst of a campaign crisis over a candidate’s misogynistic statements, Winston Wolkoff was perplexed about how his wife was able to make time for a ladies’ lunch at one of her favorite high-end Manhattan restaurants.
During the lunch, Melania Trump ordered grilled salmon, sautéed spinach and a side of French fries, and chatted about Barron and her upcoming travel plans. When Winston Wolkoff finally asked Melania about her husband’s use of a derogatory term to describe a woman’s genitals, she burst out laughing, which Winston Wolkoff said probably was “a release of tensions, more than anything else.”
But after the laughter died down, Melania Trump insisted her husband wasn’t going to quit the race. She agreed that his words on the recording were “not acceptable,” but she explained she was not angry at him.
“Nope! He is who he is,” Melania Trump said. “I told him that if he ran for president, he had to be ready for everything to be opened up and exposed. His whole life.”
Melania Trump also said she wasn’t worried about the impact on Barron, then 10: “I talk with him and I teach him, with all the political chaos around him, to be strong.”
Winston Wolkoff, a former events planner for the Met Gala and other Vogue magazine events, said she had long admired Melania Trump’s ability to appear unflappable and to exude confidence.
That was the brand she had established within the brand-building Trump family, Winston Wolkoff explained. “She wanted to appear assured, mysterious, and strong to the outside world, and she did,” Winston Wolkoff wrote.
But Winston Wolkoff began to see Melania Trump’s “I don’t care what others think” attitude in a different light as their friendship began to unravel. The friendship was tested over White House machinations about her role as the first lady’s adviser, but collapsed as local and federal investigators stepped up their inquiries into possible financial crimes committed in connection to Trump’s 2017, $104 million inauguration.
As Winston Wolkoff told ABC News, she was blindsided when The New York Times reported that Trump’s inaugural committee had paid her event-planning firm more than $26 million. The headlines falsely suggested that she had personally pocketed all or much of that money, and she said those unfair claims made her into “the cover girl for the inauguration shenanigans.”
In an interview with ABC News, Winston Wolkoff said she “begged” Melania Trump to clarify that she had not received anywhere close to $26 million — more like $480,000. She said she also hoped Melania Trump would clarify that she had known about the inaugural expenditures.
“(But) when the time came for her to come and speak the truth about a friend who left everything behind to help her, she turned her back on me … stabbed me in the back,” Winston Wolkoff told ABC News.
In her book, Winston Wolkoff said she was “blinded” to Melania Trump’s true character by her love and loyalty to her and “by the force of her personality, and Donald’s.”
“Her selfishness is so deep, it enables her to keep her distance from the rest of the world,” Wolkoff said. “The secret to her happiness is to be authentically and unapologetically skin-deep. She lives through her external attractiveness and how her appearance is perceived. Her behavior hasn’t changed from her pre–first lady days; she’s just more visible now.”
