What happened between Melania Trump and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff?

Finding someone with beef with Donald Trump is like finding a day that ends with “Y.” What’s harder is finding dissenters against his wife, Melania Trump. The Slovenian-American is regularly praised by the right for her class, but detractors have asserted that a woman like that doesn’t end up with that kind of man unless she’s a willing participant.  

No one is willing to say it louder than her former friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff who says that “she and he are one in the same,” and she wants everyone to know just how morally bankrupt the former first family is.

Melania Trump and Stephanie Wilson Wolkoff’s friendship

Winston Wolkoff has an impressive resume. She got her start as a lobbyist for Sotheby’s, a fine art brokerage based in the U.K. before going on to work for concert promoter Ron Delsner. By 1996 and was the public relations manager for Vogue magazine, where she organized massive events like the Met Gala and VH1 Fashion Week.

Her forays into the fashion world allowed her to rub shoulders with plenty of New York’s elite, including Melania Knauss, who was only dating the mogul when the pair met.  The women became fast friends. They had monthly luncheons to keep up with one another.  Winston Wolkoff came to Barron’s baby shower; Melania Trump attended Winston Wolkoff’s 40th birthday blowout, and the pair met. Winston Wolkoff has even claimed that Trump was like “the sister [she] never had.”

Other Trump insiders have claimed that the relationship was “overstated,” and that Wolkoff abused Trump’s trust.

Even so, Winston Wolkoff revealed that the former First Lady was constantly asking for favors, and that she “repeatedly referred to one of Ms. Winston Wolkoff’s sons by the wrong name.” Wolkoff regularly came to Trump’s defense and answered the call for favors, no matter how ludicrous they might have been. She even wrote a letter of recommendation for Trump’s sister to help her obtain her visa. Despite never having met the girl, she did it.

Wolkoff described Trump as sweet, someone who didn’t care what others thought of her, and steady as a rock. Those positive qualities would soon appear in a different light.

Why did Stephanie Wolkoff and Melania Trump stop being friends?

When Trump took the presidency in 2016, Winston Wolkoff’s event-planning skills were indispensable during the lead-up to the 2017 inauguration, for which she was a key event coordinator. She was named as senior adviser to First Lady Trump – with the caveat that she was completely unpaid for her labor.

In her book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady, Wolkoff describes her work as part protector, part shadow chief of staff, and part friend/mentor. Her role required an NDA — and that gag order came back to haunt her when she was accused of financial crimes, much like many of Trump’s since-indicted criminal underlings.  

Winston Wolkoff’s nebulous, unpaid job was suddenly the center of scrutiny. People were unfamiliar with what exactly she did for the First Lady, and every decision surrounding the inauguration seemed to be traceable to only the former Fashion Director. The NDA prevented her from explaining herself, which Winston Wolkoff says made her the perfect scapegoat.

Their relationship began to unravel, and Winston Wolkoff, seeing the writing on the wall, began recording their interactions. She begged Trump to explain the finances, and though Trump wanted to remain friends after the whole ordeal, she refused to speak to the allegations. Despite Trump’s silence, Wolkoff remained in contact with her, all the while building her lengthy dossier of conversations.

When her work was done, Wolkoff compiled her information, none of which was still constrained by her NDA after she answered several subpoenas, and wrote Melania and Me, which she even dedicated to her former friend. Winston Wolkoff went from defending Trump to lambasting her thusly: “Her selfishness is so deep, it enables her to keep her distance from the rest of the world.”

Could it be that the steady, sweet, and self-confident woman was actually unempathetic, self-absorbed, and only using others as a means to an end? It doesn’t seem like a stretch to those of us who pay attention to her abomination of a husband.

The NDA might prevent her from ever talking about ever piece of the drama within the Trump White House, but recorded conversations — a move Donald Trump’s former “fixer,” attorney Michael Cohen, used as well – prove she was at least partially a victim of the former First Lady’s apathy. The book serves as a way for Winston Wolkoff to save her reputation — not only from the criminal charges, but from the elite she has brushed shoulders with for years.

More importantly for those of us looking in, the anecdotes and word-for-word transcripts provide some insight into the kind of woman willing to marry a living garbage bag for some sense of security.