For a family that has built an entire political brand on demanding papers from everyone else, the Trump family remains totally allergic to producing their own.
That hypocrisy is nowhere more glaring than in the public mythology surrounding Melania Trump. We are told to see her as the immaculate immigrant success story: the beautiful girl from a small Slovenian town who arrived in America, followed every rule, worked hard, married well, and became first lady. It is a tidy fairy tale. It is also a story with some very conspicuous holes.
Melanija Knavs was born in Novo Mesto in 1970 and raised in Sevnica, a small town in what was then Yugoslavia, where her father, a member of the Communist Party, sold car parts and her mother worked as a seamstress. She began modeling as a young girl in Slovenia and in 1992, she was runner-up in Jana magazine’s “Look of the Year” contest. She subsequently signed with a modeling agency before spending the following years working in Europe.
Much of Melanija’s — or Melania’s, as she soon renamed herself — story is self-manufactured. In 2016, when Trump was first running for president, The New Yorker (typically no slouch in the investigative journalism department) wrote a story about her that actually claimed Melania was “a model with the past of a nun” and quoted Slovenian gossip columnists as saying that she seemed to be a virgin when she met Trump.
In fact, Melania was hardly a nun. Her Slovenian biographer claims that she had a sexual relationship with Peter Butoln, who went on to serve as an advisor to several Slovenian prime ministers, and Jure Zorčič, the son of a former director of a Yugoslavian basketball team. Siniša Glumičić, a Croatian plastic surgeon who says that he operated on Melania and whom the biography describes as “THE Croatian plastic surgeon, performing operations for the Balkan jet setting elite,” also boasted about having an “intimate” relationship with her. She also allegedly dated Alen Kobilica, the only Slovenian male “supermodel,” and Gregor Erbežnik, a mall owner who was seeing her at the same time as he was dating the woman who would become his wife.
Slovenian journalists have consistently connected the dots about Melania’s life in ways American media is incapable of doing. Here is Slovenske Novice in 2016:
“I am Melania Knauss, I come from Slovenia.”
With those words, in broken English, the future Mrs. Trump appeared in the spring of 1993 at the door of a modeling agency at Naglergasse 25/3 in central Vienna. There sat Wolfgang Schwarz, the representative of the American agency Elite for all of Europe and the eastern countries as far as Asia, and at the same time the owner of the modeling agency Girls & Boys Agency Vienna.
There is more to be mined here. Melania’s story does not add up — and it never did. She has benefitted from a credulous American press corps that has taken her word, the word of her husband, and the word of her friend (and former Jeffrey Epstein associate) Paolo Zampoli to create a back story that is very much in dispute.