"Tonight, Melania and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this together!"How did Melania and Donald Trump first meet? When I saw her, I went crazy This is how the President of the United States, Donald Trump, announced today that both he and his wife have coronavirus, after the test that was carried out after his Communications Director, Hope Hicks, also contracted the disease.
Trump and Melania, in principle asymptomatic, are undergoing quarantine as of today, confined to the White House, in the middle of the campaign and only one month before the elections.
A 'crush' that began 22 years ago
Donald Trump does not mince words when talking about his professional or personal life, but what the President of the United States has never revealed is how he met his fourth wife, Melania Trump, with whom he has overcome several crises and who now exercises more than ever her role as "the good wife" before the next electoral appointment.
Jeffrey Epstein, Francesco Belcaro, Paolo Zampolli... There are several theories about the person who introduced them, but what is known is how their first meeting was.
It was 22 years ago, in 1998, when Trump attended a Fashion Week party at a Manhattan nightclub. Trump was then 52 years old and still married, albeit estranged from his second wife, Marla Maples. He attended the event with whom he was his partner at the time, Celina Midelfart. There, “someone” introduced him to a stunning 28-year-old supermodel: Melania Knauss.
"I went crazy," Trump told Larry King on CNN eight years later. “There was another great supermodel sitting next to Melania, who she was supposed to meet. They told me: 'Look, there's a girl there..... I said: 'Forget about her. Who is the one on the left? 'And it was Melania."
Trump was so entranced by her beauty that he quickly got rid of her date and asked Melania for her phone number. But she preferred that he give her his.
Melania said she felt "great chemistry and energy" with her future husband, but she refused to give him her phone number because she wasn't sure she was serious, she told her or a friend. Harpers Bazaar in 2016.
The former model said she was reassured by the fact that Trump gave her up to four phone numbers, including those of her private homes in New York and Mar-a-Lago.
She made him wait several weeks until she finally called him and soon they had their first date and thus began a relationship of more than two decades together.
Who introduced the couple?
According to the New York Times, the person who introduced them was his friend Jeffrey Epstein, the businessman convicted of child trafficking who died in August 2019, hanging himself in his cell. "I was the one who introduced him to his fourth wife," Epstein would have claimed before he died.
Trump and Epstein's friendship was forged between 1980 and 2000, when they were neighbors in Palm Beach and shared parties in Manhattan.
“I have known Jeff for 15 years. Fantastic guy," Trump told New York magazine in 2002. It is very fun to be with him. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are younger."
Epstein, Trump and the president's friend Tom Barrack were "a bunch of nightlife musketeers," wrote Michael Wolff in his book Fire and Fury. But following the child abuse allegations against Epstein, Trump said they were "not really that close" and that I was "never a big fan of him."
However, other media such as Page Six point to the Italian Francesco Belcaro, an event organizer in New York, as a 'matchmaker' for Trump and Melania.
This is how he would have made it known to one of the guests at other of his parties, assuring that he was the one who really introduced Trump and Melania, and that what was published in other media was "false".
But according to the version closest to Donald and Melania Trump, the person who really brought them together was modeling agent Paolo Zampolli. The Italian was the one who organized the party at the Kit Cat Club, where the then famous real estate magnate fell in love with the beautiful Slovenian model.
After a three-year courtship, Trump proposed to Melania in 2001 with a 10-carat diamond engagement ring.
The couple married in 2005 in Palm Beach, in a star-studded wedding that included Billy Joel, who performed for the couple, Barbara Walters, Matt Lauer, and interestingly, former Democratic President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary .
Donald Trump has five children, Barron (13 years old) with Melania and four others from previous marriages: Ivanka, Donald, Tiffany and Eric.
An up and down relationship
In their 22 years of relationship and 15 of marriage, Trump and Melania have gone through many ups and downs, starring in some awkward moments even in front of the cameras, but they have always remained close.
Last June, Melania's forced smile with her husband in one of her public appearances amid the wave of riots in the country over 'black lives matter', once again revealed the distant relationship between the president of the United States and the first lady.
This grimace was not the first public sign of disgust Melania had shown at her appearances with Trump in recent years.
During the inauguration ceremony of her husband in January 2017, one of her smiles turned into an expression of sadness as the American president was sworn in:
And in the following months, Melania was seen on several occasions trying to get rid of her husband's hand when he tried to take it:
They denied crisis due to rumors of infidelity
The Trumps faced rumors of a crisis in their marriage shortly after his election in 2017, following the disclosure of two alleged extramarital affairs by the president, with former Playboy model Karen McDougal and with porn actress Stormy Daniels. , something he denies.
Melania Trump then assured that she did not care about the alleged infidelities of her husband, and she denied problems in the couple. "I'm a mother and a first lady, so I have much more important matters to think about," Melania told ABC News.
