Ivana Trump: The First Wife, The First Warning

by Ellie Leonard, Contributing Editor

Long before political rallies and plastering gold leaf all over the Oval Office, Donald Trump was married to Ivana Zelníčková, a Czechoslovakian immigrant born to a working-class family. Her mother worked as a telephone operator, and her father as an electrical engineer who encouraged his daughter to learn to ski, giving her the opportunity to travel beyond the Soviet-era borders of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

Records say that Ivana attended Charles University in Prague, earning her master’s degree in physical education in 1972. However, a declassified report from the FBI in 1989 that was originally listed as “secret” (and is highly redacted), states that she lived in Vienna in 1972.

“A review of Ivana’s INS file revealed that it is fraught with inconsistencies regarding dates of residence, schooling and employment. It appears that she emigrated to Vienna, Austria...where she was employed as a model. Nowhere else in her INS file is there any indication of ever having attended Charles University.” - The Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1989

In 1971 she married Alfred Winklmayr, an Austrian ski instructor, in order to leave Czechoslovakia and become an Austrian citizen. It is what was referred to at the time as a “Cold War marriage,” and was dissolved in 1973, around the same time her boyfriend Jiří Staidl died in a car crash. By this time Winklmayr had moved to Los Angeles to continue working as a ski instructor. Ivana moved to Canada and began dating Jiří Syrovátka and working as a model for the Audrey Morris Agency.

While working at a reception in 1976 at the now-closed Maxwell’s Plum in New York City, Ivana met Donald Trump. They would marry a year later on April 9th, 1977, signing a $25 million prenup that she would later claim she hadn’t understood. They had their first child, Donald Jr., exactly nine months later, and would go on to have two more kids, Ivanka and Eric, over the next seven years, all while Donald built up his casinos and real estate and earned a reputation as a New York City playboy.

“He even tried to get Playboy to do a spread called ‘The Girls of Trump,’ wooing his most shapely staffers, including a former beauty queen secretary, into posing for the magazine with a sliding scale of offers on everything from full nude to breast to ‘wet-lip’ shots.” - Wayne Barrett, author of Trump, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, The Downfall, the Reinvention

During his marriage to Ivana, Donald was known for getting handsy with other women. One woman, Jessica Leeds, told the New York Times that Trump “grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt,” on a flight in the 1980s.

“He was like an octopus, his hands were everywhere.” - Jessica Leeds

In 1985, Donald met Marla Maples, runner-up Miss Georgia USA, and the 1983 Miss Resaca Beach Poster Girl, at a celebrity tennis match. She was 20 years old; he was 39. At first, they hid their relationship, but soon became more brazen, and Maples even moved onto Trump’s yacht, the Trump Princess. In 1989, he even brought Maples secretly along on a family vacation to Aspen, hoping he could have his cake and eat it too. Maples had other plans. She approached Ivana and put out her hand: “I’m Marla, and I love your husband. Do you?” When Trump was interviewed about it later, he said casually, “There wasn’t shouting, but you could obviously see there was some friction.”

“I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?”

By 1990, Donald and Ivana were divorced (the documents sealed by a confidentiality agreement), and though Maples hoped this meant they could be married right away, it wasn’t until she got pregnant in 1993 that Trump even considered the idea. In fact, he proposed something else, according to his good pal Jeffrey Epstein.

As recorded by journalist Michael Wolff, who interviewed Jeffrey Epstein over several years, when Marla Maples told Trump she was pregnant, he panicked. “What am I going to do? She’s pregnant. I’m going to have to marry her.” Epstein thought Maples was lying, but after a visit to the doctor, it was confirmed that she was indeed pregnant. “What if I pushed her down the stairs?” Trump mused. “You could murder her and go to jail,” said Epstein. “Or perhaps nothing would happen, but you would have pushed her down the stairs. And when the divorce happens, that would be something she could testify to in court.”

“What if I pushed her down the stairs?”

Donald ended up marrying Maples—two months after giving birth to their daughter Tiffany—at a wedding attended by Jeffrey Epstein at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Three years later, Maples would be caught having an affair with Trump’s bodyguard, Spencer Wagner, under a lifeguard stand at 4:00 am, and they separated a year later. Their divorce, too, would be sealed, but not before he moved on to his current wife, Melania (Knauss) Trump.

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Meanwhile, Ivana had begun writing books and giving interviews about what life with Donald Trump really looked like, especially when it came to family.

“He was a loving father, don’t get me wrong, and he was a good provider, but he was not the father which would take a stroll and go to the Central Park or go play to baseball with them or something. It was only until they were about 18-years-old [that] he could communicate with them, because he could start to talk business with them.” - Ivana Trump

She said she feared Fred Trump, who was a “really brutal father,” and that Donald didn’t want his first child named after himself: “[What] if he’s a loser?”

In a 1990 divorce deposition, Ivana allegedly stated that Donald had raped her after going “16 months without making love to his wife.” The deposition, although not public, was obtained by Harry Hurt III, author of the 1993 book "The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump." Ivana would later refute her statement, saying that she didn’t mean it to be taken literally, but that she had felt “violated.” Harry Hurt III described the alleged attack as a “violent assault,” and that Ivana had confided it to close friends. On another occasion, he had ripped hair out of Ivana’s scalp after an altercation in a plastic surgeon’s office. She would file for divorce a year later on the grounds of “cruel and inhuman” treatment.

In 1992, Trump sued Ivana for $25 million for violating the gag clause in their divorce agreement by “disclosing facts about him in her best-selling book”, For Love Alone, a fictional romance. This was the same amount as their prenuptial agreement, which he could no longer afford due to being reportedly “over half a billion dollars in the hole.” He won, bolstering the gag order, though to what end I don’t know. Her book would continue to print over the next two years.

In hindsight, Ivana had more perspective on her marriage, which she had once held in such high esteem, at least on the surface. In 1987, a decade into their marriage, and two years after being introduced to Marla Maples, Donald handed Ivana a stack of papers the “size of a telephone book.” “It’s our new nuptial agreement,” he said. “You get $10 million. Sign it.” It was Christmas Eve.

And when Ivana went back to work for Donald, he would call her, screaming into the phone, “You don’t know what you’re doing!” When her coworkers asked her why she put up with him, she said, “Because Donald is right.” He hated how she dressed, thought she showed too much cleavage, and he wanted her to work less and be home with the kids more. Eventually, he stopped having sex with her, and she blamed herself.

When the story of Ivana confronting Marla Maples in Aspen hit the newspapers, Donald called the reporter, gossip columnist Liz Smith from the New York Daily News, to thank her.

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Ivana remembered a man named John Walter who would visit Donald in his office, always clicking his heels and saying “Heil Hitler,” which she assumed was a family joke. Donald kept a copy of Hitler’s My New Order next to the bed, she said, a compilation of speeches leading up to 1939. She asked Donald who had given it to him.

Davis would refute the latter, stating that it had, indeed, been My New Order, and that he wasn’t, in fact, Jewish. Trump has always been cryptic about the whole thing.

And while Donald Trump continued to discredit Ivana whenever and wherever he could, she spent time making amends with the people he’d screwed over. But as word spread, their kids began to crumble under the pressure.

“The children are all wrecks. I don’t know how Donald can say they are great and fine. Ivanka now comes home from school crying, ‘Mommy, does it mean I’m not going to be Ivanka Trump anymore?’ Little Eric asks me, ‘Is it true you are going away and not coming back?’” - Ivana to Liz Smith, New York Daily News

Years passed, and while Ivana found success writing three more books and appearing on the Home Shopping Network and QVC, where her purple velour jogging suits and Australian crystal pave lockets sold $3 to $4 million a month, by the time the COVID lockdowns hit New York City she had become a complete recluse in her $20 million town house just off Central Park on the Upper East Side. She’d remarried and remarried again, and although she’d divorced her last husband, Italian actor Rossano Rubicondi, 11 years prior, his death of a pulmonary embolism in 2021 was further reason for her not to leave her house. Coupled with her fear of catching COVID, she’d completely pulled away from friends and family.

“She hasn’t gone anywhere or done anything. She was so afraid of getting sick, so she really became very reclusive.” - Nikki Haskell, friend

On July 14th, 2022, Ivana Trump was discovered at the bottom of her circular staircase, dead of an apparent fall. Some reports say that an unknown male called in a wellness check on Trump’s residence when “he hadn’t seen her in a while.” Others say police responded to a cardiac arrest at her 10 East 64th Street home, and that she was “dead on arrival.” The New York City Medical Examiner said she died of “blunt impact injuries” to the torso, and the NYPD said there did not “appear to be any criminality” related to her death. The death was ruled accidental.

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Now, we can look at Ivana’s death at 73 years old in two ways. One, she had a “steep and deep” marble staircase with ratty carpets that worried her friends.

“I was always so upset about that staircase. I hated those stairs. They were so treacherous. We worried about her falling. Her townhouse was four stories high and while there was an elevator, she never used it. It’s a beautiful staircase but I wouldn’t want it. It’s so steep and deep. Friends used to say to me, ‘Why don’t you stay with Ivana when you’re in New York?’ But you couldn’t pay me to hang out there and go up and down those stairs.” - Nikki Haskell, friend

And I’m not saying that didn’t happen; it easily could have. But there’s always door number two.

Around the time Ivana Trump was killed “falling down the stairs” her ex-husband, Donald Trump, and two children, Ivanka and Donald Jr., were being deposed by the New York City Attorney General’s Office as part of a civil investigation into the family real estate business over “fraudulent conduct in the way the Trump Organization valued its real estate holdings, allegedly overvaluing properties like 40 Wall Street and even the former president’s Trump Tower apartment.” While there is no evidence that Ivana would have been deposed, she held key managerial positions in the Trump Organization. The Attorney General delayed the depositions after Ivana’s passing.

In February 2024, Judge Arthur Engoron ordered the defendants, Donald Trump and two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric (Ivanka was removed due to the statute of limitations), to pay a total of $364 million of “ill-gotten gains.” As of today, they have not paid a dime, Donald Trump calling Engoron a “rogue” and “fake judge,” and stating that he (Trump) had “won the case because it’s called ‘statute of limitations.’”

Ivana Trump is buried under a modest headstone at Donald Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, near the first hole, 1300 yards from the graves of 97 Black Civil War soldiers, a juxtaposition that has not gone unnoticed. New Jersey is the only state north of the Mason-Dixon line to have enslaved Black Americans prior to the Civil War. However, Ivana’s presence along the par 5 likely has more to do with tax avoidance than any kind of honor or “in memoriam.” Because, according to the New Jersey state tax code, any land used as a cemetery is exempt from most taxes, including real estate. Bedminster also receives a “farmland” tax break, saving Trump’s golf course a quarter-million dollars a year.

So, depending on how much Ivana’s last resting place along the first hole accounts for, she’ll have the $25 million prenup paid off in no time.