How Donald Trump met Melania: A chance meeting at a Victoria’s Secret party saw love bloom for the first couple
A new book which looks at President Donald Trump's history with women - many of them bordering on harassment and sexual assault - also recounts how the POTUS met his third wife, Melania Knauss, for the first time when he had gone to a party to meet another model.
According to journalists Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy's book 'All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator', set to release on October 22, in 1998 Trump was back in the dating scene about a year after his separation from his second wife, Marla Maples.
An excerpt of the book was obtained by Esquire magazine.
Although he already had a date for the night - Norwegian heiress and then-NYU student Celina Midelfart - Trump was looking forward to meeting a new model at the Kit Kat Club at a party for Victoria’s Secret model. However, instead of the model he was supposed to get set up with, Trump's eyes wandered to the Slovenian woman sitting next to her, who happened to be Melania.
“I went crazy,” he told Larry King during an interview with the CNN host in 2005. “There was this great supermodel sitting next to Melania. I was supposed to meet this supermodel. They said, ‘Look, there’s so and so.’ I said, “Forget about her. Who is the one on the left?’ And it was Melania.”
Melania was 28 years old at the time, while Trump was 52. She had been invited to the party by her friend and agent, Paolo Zampolli. When Trump's date for the night, Midelfart, briefly left the party to use the washroom, Trump seized on the opportunity to make a move on Melania. When he asked her for her number, she initially refused to give it to him. Instead, she made a power move by asking him for his number instead.
She told Harper's Bazaar later on in her marriage that Trump was so smitten with her that he ended up giving her all his contact numbers, including how to reach him at the office and Mar-a-Lago. After a month of courtship and a few dinner dates, Melania was flying to Mar-a-Lago in Trump's private jet.