Melania Trump may not want to face up to the "humiliation" of attending her husband's criminal trial, according to her former aide, but she's never leaving him.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who served as a senior adviser to the former first lady, said Donald Trump and his wife had an unusual marriage but retained a bond, even though the former president is standing trial for falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to an adult film actress who says they had an affair.
"I do believe it is a transactional marriage in so many ways that they both garnered so much out of their relationship, and by marrying Donald, Melania really did finally get to be the Vogue cover model that she's always wanted to be, that supermodel, and by marrying Melania, Donald was legitimized as trying to get away from that whole playboy mentality that everyone wanted to characterize him as," Wolkoff said.
Former attorney Michael Cohen testified that Trump was more concerned that Stormy Daniels telling her story would ruin his election chances, and Wolkoff agreed that he wouldn't have been concerned about his wife's reaction, and she confirmed that Melania had urged him to characterize his remarks about molesting women on the "Access Hollywood" tape as merely "locker room talk."
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"In my opinion, knowing Melania, knowing that she really did fight for the 'locker room talk,' that it was something that she shared with me at lunch, after she had canceled her interview with Anderson Cooper and that was something that she was very nervous about when it first came out," Wolkoff said. "It was the only thing she thought would put his election at any chance of being at risk. I do not believe Donald's first priority was Melania because she isn't going anywhere. They are to one another unlike anyone is to, I think, anyone else."
The jury may have noticed by now that Trump's wife has not appeared in court to support him, and legal experts say that might not help his case – but Wolkoff would not expect her to make an appearance.
"I don't think we're going to see Melania Trump accompanying titled to court," Wolkoff said. "Melania is Melania's own person, in regards, again, to a marriage that you want to consider to be something that most people are trying to still understand, [and] don't. I do not see her supporting him this way because she is not someone who, I think, that you can feel that humiliation without having to put yourself in front of the cameras. Everything Melania's does is staged, so everything is articulated in a way for her before or she does her interviews. So everything, like I said, is very strategically planned. She is not going to put herself in a position where she's given anyone the opportunity to say anything negative about her."
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