Melania Trump is set to receive a staggering payout if she ever divorces her husband, Donald – thanks to a revised prenup that she had renegotiated back in 2017
The Trumps maintain ‘a transactional marriage’ and conditions are so strained they occupy separate bedrooms in the White House, a former confidant and advisor revealed. Reports indicate Mrs Trump reworked her prenuptial contract in June 2017 before accompanying her husband to Washington, using the delay as leverage – and revised it again in late 2022 amid Trump’s mounting legal and political troubles.
A divorce attorney projected she could receive upwards of $50 million – substantially more than what Mr Trump’s previous two spouses obtained.. However, it comes after a former aide revealed the chilling reason Melania will never leave Donald.
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The pair initially encountered each other in 1998 at a Manhattan gathering where the recently separated Trump, now 79, requested then-fashion model Melania Knauss’s phone number.
She has stated she declined his opening approach because he was accompanied by another woman that evening.
However, by the following year, they had become romantically involved. The couple tied the knot in January 2005, and welcomed their son Barron in 2006, the same year Melania became a US citizen.
Barron is currently 19-years-old and a student at the New York University. Melania is the third wife of Mr. Trump, who is a father of five and is 24 years her senior.
His first marriage was to Czech athlete and model Ivana Zelnickova, which officially ended in divorce in 1992 after they had three children together, Donald Jr. , Ivanka, and Eric.
Mr. Trump’s second marriage was to actress Marla Maples in 1993, which resulted in another daughter named Tiffany. The couple separated in 1997 and finalized their divorce in 1999. He had prenuptial agreements with both wives.
Ivana Trump reportedly received $14 million, a mansion in Connecticut, and an apartment in Trump Plaza as part of their divorce settlement. Meanwhile, Ms. Maples is reported to have received a $2 million settlement.
If Trump’s third marriage ends in divorce, Melania could potentially receive a significantly larger sum than his first two wives. In December 2019, divorce lawyer Jacqueline Newman, a managing partner at Manhattan-based Berkman Bottger Newman and Rodd, suggested that Mrs. Trump could receive approximately $50 million.
Ms. Newman told Town and Country, “In this situation, if she has $50 million, she can afford to buy something,” adding, “But $50 million, while it’s definitely a lot of money, in New York City, for what she’s used to, she wouldn’t be able to replicate what she has now. “He probably had a good sense of what kind of lifestyle they’d be living, so I would imagine the payout would be fairly generous.”
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Following Trump’s White House arrival in January 2017, his spouse remained absent for five months. When questioned about potential marital difficulties, she insisted she wanted to avoid disrupting then 10 year old Barron’s academic schedule.
Yet a recent publication by Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan suggests Trump used the delayed relocation as negotiating power to revise her prenuptial contract. She discovered fresh information through news reports, it was alleged.
She used that period to “revise her financial arrangement with Trump – what Melania called ‘taking care of Barron’,” Ms Jordan documented in The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump. Her initial prenup had been quite modest, and the revised deal guaranteed that Barron wouldn’t be excluded from the family enterprise, the book alleges.
In her 2018 publication Unhinged, former Trump assistant and The Apprentice participant Omarosa Manigault-Newman asserted Mrs Trump is anxious to divorce the president. She penned: “In my opinion, Melania is counting every minute until he is out of office and she can divorce him.”
It is reported that Slovenia-born Melania, America’s second foreign-born first lady never anticipated her husband to prevail in 2016 and she broke down in tears when he beat Hillary Clinton.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former close friend and confidant of the first lady, and author of the book Melania and Me, alleged the Trumps had separate bedrooms in the White House and “a transactional marriage”. According to her profile on the White House website, Mrs Trump is “first and foremost a mother and wife.”
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