In Mela-la land all loyalty got me was a knife in the back
The pre-Trump Melania was a caring, fun-loving friend. Then she found power and dropped the mask, the first lady’s former confidante says
Some friendships fizzle out, others explode in flames. The relationship between Melania Trump and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff falls firmly into the latter camp. In brief, ice-cold Melania stabbed her bestie in the back; now the bestie has returned the favour by writing a bean-spilling book.
The pair met in 2003, when the Slovenian-born model, then Melania Knauss, was scaling New York society’s slippery pole and Winston Wolkoff was working at Vogue. The two women enjoyed figure-friendly lunches at Manhattan’s chichiest restaurants.
“I loved her. We just had this giddy thing. Melania would laugh so hard her eyes would fill up with tears,” recalls Winston Wolkoff, speaking from her home on the Upper East Side. The future first lady was apparently a good listener and full of advice. “Every time after seeing her I felt ramped up,” she says.
They would take selfies together, exchange endless emoji-laden messages, and Melania would send her a white orchid every birthday. How sweet, Winston Wolkoff thought then. How scheming, she thinks now.
Three days after Donald Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” audio tape was leaked in October 2016, Melania cried with laughter when, over lunch, her friend wondered how often the words “pussy” and “president” were used in the same sentence. The odd reaction was a “release of tension”, Winston Wolkoff writes in her book, Melania and Me.
After Trump’s win, Winston Wolkoff, an events planner who organised the Met Gala for years (“No money, no comey,” she would reportedly quip), produced the presidential inauguration before becoming Melania’s top adviser.
Things soured spectacularly. In early 2018, when the $US107m ($146m) cost of the inauguration came under scrutiny and Winston Wolkoff was booted out of the White House, Melania stayed shtoom as her old friend was thrown to the wolves. (“My fee was less than half of 1 per cent (of the total cost),” she writes of her $US480,000 cut.)
The memoir delivers death by a thousand cuts. “I now realise Melania is not a normal woman,” she writes.
Winston Wolkoff, 49, once suggested to Melania, 50, that Trump might have ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; does she think his wife might suffer from a personality disorder too? “They’re together for a reason,” she says. “Yes. I don’t want to say that it’s sociopathic because I’m not a doctor.”
Last week, Trump-haters were electrified after Winston Wolkoff confessed she had recorded her phone conversations with the first lady. “I needed to protect myself. There’d be no other way to prove my innocence. These people are masters of deceit.”
Disaster was perhaps inevitable. The mother of three, who is married to a property mogul, was a political neophyte — she had never even voted before 2016 — when she took on hiring Melania’s East Wing staff, devising her initiative to counter cyber-bullying and writing her speeches. “It’s embarrassing. I really don’t know how I lived all of these years without knowing what I’ve now learnt about politics,” she says.
She plans to vote for Joe Biden in November.
She also claims to have been her friend’s protector against the sharp elbows of Ivanka Trump, aka “Princess”, carrying out “Operation Block Ivanka” to ensure Melania’s stepdaughter was squeezed out of camera shot during Trump’s swearing-in.
The long-festering animosity between the pair “comes down to power, greed and the princess who wanted to be queen”, says Winston Wolkoff, adding that all of Trump’s adult children “present beautifully but are monsters”.
Melania and Ivanka competed to be Vogue cover stars after Trump’s triumph, and the first lady refuses to wear the same fashion designers as the first daughter, she claims. She also reveals that Melania googled “what to wear on safari” before opting for the infamous colonial-style outfit, complete with pith helmet, on her 2018 trip to Kenya.
Winston Wolkoff also claims Melania demanded a new loo before moving into the White House and was miffed when her gift-wrapping room was abolished as part of negotiations for a private plane upgrade.
The toil and trouble of working with “snakes” — as Melania allegedly labelled Ivanka and her retinue — resulted in Winston Wolkoff having to go to hospital for operations on slipped spinal discs (doctors initially tried to send her to the psychiatric ward). Yet she dementedly clung onto her position in Mela-La land. “If I commit to something I don’t walk away,” she says.
Surely the allure of the White House and jetting around on Air Force One was a factor too? “Absolutely. That proximity to power, you get lost in it.”
Why does the sphinx-like first lady have so few friends? “She doesn’t have any interest in sharing who she is,” she says firmly. “I just thought she was very private but now I understand she doesn’t want anyone delving into her past because she was truly created to fit the perfect piece of arm candy for Donald. He didn’t want another wife that needed to be in the spotlight, and she was OK with that.
“They don’t believe in the lovey-dovey-type stuff. Not at all,” she says.
However, she’s convinced that Melania will stick with Trump even if she would rather not be in the White House. “I think Melania liked being under the radar; she envisions herself rather on a yacht in the south of France.”
Teary and jittery, Winston Wolkoff is still struggling after becoming the poster girl for Trumpian cronyism, falsely portrayed as having personally pocketed $US26m ($35.6m). “I was the perfect headline. I’m that shiny object,” she says. “I couldn’t even put a sentence together for a while. I didn’t leave the house for a year.”
She begins weeping. “I wish I wasn’t in this position to even have written this book. I wish I had my old life back. I’m not looking to be a hero taking down the President — that’s not what my intention in life was.”
The bitchy fashion world has nothing on Trumpland: “The White House is so intentionally masqueraded in what they do, the machinations and self-dealings. You’re not expecting it. I don’t want to say the mob but it’s like that.”
Perhaps perversely, the book is dedicated to Melania. “I wouldn’t be here without my family and friends. I almost died. They almost put me in a loony bin. The things that I went through … she did this to me,” she says, lip wobbling. “This is to Melania, for literally such destruction and deception.”
The Sunday Times
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