When Donald Trump first became President of the United States in 2017, his wife Melania did not immediately move from New York City to the nation’s capital. The new first lady remained in her Manhattan penthouse for several months with their, then, 11-year-old son Barron, before making the move to Washington later that spring. Now, a new book by Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan alleges that Melania had used that period to renegotiate her prenuptial agreement, a ploy which the first lady called “taking care of Barron.”
The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump purports to uncover the many ways Donald Trump’s third wife has managed her image, including details of how she used her husband’s election as leverage for redrawing the conditions of their financial arrangement.
“She wanted proof in writing that when it came to financial opportunities and inheritance, Barron would be treated as more of an equal to Trump’s oldest three children,” Jordan explains.
When Melania married Donald Trump in 2005, she signed a pre-nuptial agreement that outlined the terms of their financial union, and the conditions of a potential divorce settlement. But Jordan reports that this contract was not overly-generous to Melania.
The 2016 presidential election, however, laid bare many of Trump’s sexual indiscretions, including an audio recording where the former reality TV star bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, and reports that Trump had paid The National Enquirer to bury stories about affairs he had with a former Playboy model.
As a result, Trump’s election put Melania in a strong position to renegotiate the financial terms of her marriage, as well as Barron’s equal footing with Trump’s other children. (Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric are all the products of the President’s first marriage to Ivana Trump, and Tiffany Trump is the daughter of the President’s second wife, Marla Maples).
Asked to comment on the book’s claims, Melania Trump’s chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham, said: “Yet another book about Mrs. Trump with false information and sources. This book belongs in the fiction genre.”
