Melania Trump Denies Epstein Rumor By way of Subtweet

Picture: Win McNamee/Getty Pictures

Melania Trump is famously not massive on showy shows of help for her husband, as evidenced by her skipping nearly each one among Donald Trump’s 2024 marketing campaign occasions and disappearing from the White Home for weeks at a time. However the First Girl does truly stand by her man. It’s simply laborious to see generally as her strategies are a bit unorthodox — like, say, sharing a cryptic Friday-night tweet to defend the president towards rumors in regards to the closeness of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Melania posted this from her private account at 5 p.m. on Friday:

This publish largely went unnoticed, most likely as a result of at first look it seems to be like a typical guide promotion. Her private account, @MELANIATRUMP, isn’t all that energetic. Typically, she’ll publish 3 times in someday, then say nothing for 2 weeks. She primarily makes use of the account to share generic vacation greetings, repost some messages from the official @FLOTUS account, and plug no matter she’s at the moment promoting. That features occasional posts about her best-selling memoir, Melania, although the guide got here out final October and the AI-narrated audiobook model was launched in Might.

So it’s doable Melania simply wished to remind those who she dropped a memoir 9 months in the past as they plotted their weekend seaside reads. And he or she simply occurred to highlight the chapter about how she met her husband.

But the context positive makes it appear to be a response to the Trump-Epstein scandal, which exploded final week. The publish went up nearly precisely 24 hours after The Wall Road Journal revealed its report on Trump’s birthday letter to the late intercourse offender, and the two-page excerpt refutes the newly resurfaced rumor that Epstein had launched Donald and Melania.

The official story the Trumps have been telling for years is that Donald met his future third spouse, Melania Knauss, in November 1998 at a Style Week celebration hosted by Paolo Zampolli, an Italian entrepreneur and founding father of the ID Fashions administration company. This matches the account in chapter 5 of Melania, titled, “How I Met Donald Trump,” although Zampolli shouldn’t be named. Melania says a buddy invited her to a celebration on the Equipment Kat Klub thrown by her unnamed boyfriend. Throughout this soirée stuffed with “fashions, photographers, editors, and designers,” she encountered her future husband:

I noticed my buddy wave at somebody behind me. After I circled, I observed a person and a horny blonde girl approaching us.

“Hello, I’m Donald Trump,” the person mentioned when he reached my desk. “Good to satisfy you.” I acknowledged the identify, and I knew he was a businessman or superstar, however not a lot else. He put his hand out to shake mine.

“Whats up,” I replied. “I’m Melania.”

Nonetheless, there’s a rumor, which could have been began by Epstein himself, that he had truly launched Donald and Melania. In July 2019, a month earlier than Epstein’s demise in a federal jail cell in Manhattan, Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman reported within the New York Instances that Epstein had been making this declare because the 2016 election to show he was near the president:

However whereas Mr. Trump has dismissed the connection, Mr. Epstein, because the election, has performed it up, claiming to those who he was the one who launched Mr. Trump to his third spouse, Melania Trump, although neither of the Trumps has ever talked about Mr. Epstein taking part in a job of their assembly. Mrs. Trump has mentioned that her future husband merely requested for her telephone quantity at a celebration on the Equipment Kat Membership throughout Style Week in 1998.

Zampolli has insisted Epstein was mendacity. Because the New York Submit reported on July 11, 2019, Zampolli advised the authors of a guide on Trump launched round that point that the rumor was “faux information”:

… the authors reached out to Zampolli, an envoy to the UN for Dominica, to see if Epstein had attended the style bash.

Zampolli’s response, in crimson capital letters, was “NO WAY.”

He known as the concept that Epstein had launched them “faux information. B S.”

The Submit reported that, days later, Zampolli was heard exclaiming at a celebration, “The entire world is aware of I launched” Donald and Melania.

Epstein made a distinct, cruder declare about position he had performed within the Trumps’ burgeoning relationship in conversations with journalist Michael Wolff, which have been recorded in August 2017. The Every day Beast reported final November:

The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the primary time he slept along with her was on my airplane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Categorical.

Epstein definitely isn’t a really dependable supply. And even when his declare have been true, it’s not some smoking gun that proves each sordid conspiracy idea about Trump and Epstein. It’s not a giant revelation that Donald and even Melania was palling round with Epstein within the late Nineties and early aughts. There are a number of footage of the three of them partying collectively from round this time, and Epstein’s social circle included dozens of fashions, celebrities, and high-society figures who had nothing to do together with his abuse of younger ladies.

Nonetheless, Melania’s publish is fascinating since she doesn’t at all times publicly come to her husband’s protection. Although judging from the highest trending Google searches on July 21 …

If Melania actually needs to dispel this Epstein rumor, subtweeting most likely isn’t he finest method to go about it.