About six months after they married, she became pregnant with Barron—and things changed, according to one source. She was 35—“checkout time” for women, as Trump once told Howard Stern-and no longer the dewy fox he’d met seven years earlier. A visitor to one of Trump’s homes, late into Melania’s pregnancy, recalls him remarking that he agreed to the baby on the condition that Melania would get her body back. “She promised him that everything would go back to the way it was,” says this guest; it struck this person as a “contract.” And he was simply rude to her. “There was no ‘How do you feel?’ No opening of doors, making sure she didn’t fall. Just ‘You wanted to have a baby.’ ” (Grisham counters that Mr. Trump was “very warm and supportive throughout her pregnancy.”)
As Donald’s celebrity ballooned with
The Apprentice, Melania was asked to tolerate even more. His public interchanges with Howard Stern, which provided a kind of Greek chorus to their relationship, went from lewdly objectifying to grotesque. He agreed with Stern that his daughter Ivanka was “a piece of ass.” He joked that if Melania were in a horrible, mangling car crash he’d still love her as long as the breasts remained intact. When asked by Stern whether he’d be up for “banging 24-year-olds,” Trump eagerly assented. Subsequent accusations suggest similar improprieties.
As
People-magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff
wrote during the campaign, while she was on assignment in 2005 to interview the couple at Mar-a-Lago, Trump pushed her against a wall and jammed his tongue down her throat after Melania had left the room. Other women, including contestants in the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants and
Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos, claim to have had similar experiences after Trump had married Melania. Trump has dismissed them as liars, and Melania has repeated the assertion. But a source in Trump’s orbit says she was well aware of the man she married. According to her old friend Lisa Bytner, Melania’s attitude has always been “Live and let live.”