Melania takes refuge from affair headlines

MELANIA Trump has retreated to her family’s estate as fresh details on her husband’s alleged infidelity emerge and she faces pressure to dump him.

AS FRESH details spill into the headlines about how Donald Trump allegedly cheated on her early in their marriage, Melania has retreated to her family’s estate in Florida.

The former model escaped the intense media glare by spending the past week at the family’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida, with their 12-year-old son, Barron.

But even then, there was no perfect refuge from the swirl of attention surrounding recent legal activity related to the President’s past conduct with women.

On Mrs Trump’s first full day away, when the President also was at their Mar-a-Lago estate, her husband didn’t have dinner with her, instead opting to eat with lawyer Michael Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $US130,000 ($A170,000) in 2016 to keep her from going public with her story of a 2006 tryst with Mr Trump.

The Trumps did eat dinner together on Thursday night after the President returned to Florida, with boxing promoter Don King stopping by to chat.

Reports of an alleged affair continue to appear in US newspapers. Picture: AFP/ Getty/Ethan Miller and Olivier Douliery

“Melania should do for this generation of girls what Hillary Clinton did not do for mine and leave her jerk of a husband,” conservative commentator S.E. Cupp wrote in an opinion piece that was recently splashed across the front page of the New York Daily News with the headline “Dump Trump!”

Now, the First Lady is facing mounting pressure to exit her 13-year union with Mr Trump, much like Hillary Clinton was urged to do after Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky became public in the late 1990s.

Mr Trump himself recently joked about the possibility of his wife leaving him. She was seated at the head table at a Washington dinner last month where the President, in a speech that traditionally pokes at friends and adversaries, addressed the heavy staff churn at the White House.

An opinion piece has urged Melania Trump to leave her husband. Picture: New York Daily News

“Now the question everyone keeps asking is, ‘Who’s going to be the next to leave? Steve Miller or Melania?”’ he said, referring to policy adviser Stephen Miller. “That is terrible, honey, but you love me, right?”

A Marist-McClatchy poll in February found the public divided on the issue, with 43 per cent saying the First Lady should stay married, 34 per cent saying she should leave her husband and 23 per cent unsure what she should do.

Through it all, Mrs Trump has kept a steely silence on claims by Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal that they had sexual relationships with Trump that began in 2006 just after the birth of Barron.

The First Lady is facing mounting pressure to exit her 13-year union with Trump. Picture: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

She is silent now on her husband’s dealings with other women but has traversed this awkward terrain before.

“People think and talk about me like, ‘Oh Melania, Oh poor Melania,’” she told CNN in a 2016 interview. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I can handle everything.”

She gave that interview after her husband was heard on a decade-old audiotape describing how he had grabbed women by their genitalia and kissed them without permission. At the time, Mr Trump also faced accusations of sexual misconduct from more than a dozen women. He has called the women’s charges false, and said he was engaging in “locker room talk” on the tape.

Friends say the First Lady, who married Mr Trump while his divorce from his second wife was being finalised, can handle what’s coming at her.

“The First Lady is very strong. She’s, unfortunately, used to attacks of fake news,” said Paolo Zampolli, her friend and former modelling agent.

— With AP