Melania Trump Wanted to “Humiliate” Her Husband After the Stormy Daniels Hush Money Deal Came to Light: Report
Shortly before Donald Trump was criminally charged for his hush money deal with Stormy Daniels, we learned that Melania Trump was still angry with her husband over the alleged affair and didn’t care if he ended up going to prison for it. So it’s pretty unsurprising to learn that when the allegations first came out that he’d paid a porn star six figures to keep quiet about cheating on his spouse, Melania was extra pissed about it and feeling pretty ungenerous toward the then president.
In American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, From Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden, New York Times reporter Katie Rogers reports that after the allegations went public in 2018, Melania refused to join Trump on a trip abroad and headed to Mar-a-Lago without him. “[FLOTUS press secretary Stephanie] Grisham, who traveled with her on that jaunt, said that the first lady had wanted to communicate her anger to the president,” Rogers writes, according to People. Melania, Grisham told Rogers, “was pissed at Trump and wanted him to be a little humiliated that she took off.”
Four years later, Melania appeared to “communicate” a similar message when she didn’t show up for Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago (a.k.a. her home), following his arraignment by the Manhattan district attorney on 34 felony charges stemming from the hush money deal. (He pleaded not guilty and has denied the affair.) At the time, reporter Linda Marx revealed that the former first lady did not “sympathize with Donald’s plight.” A source familiar with the matter said, “Despite what happens to Donald, she will be fine.”
Woman who accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993 defects to Russia
A former staffer who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault has defected to Moscow, telling state media that she felt “safe” in Russia and would seek citizenship there.
Tara Reade, who drew headlines during the 2020 presidential race by accusing then-candidate Biden of sexually harassing and assaulting her, said she decided to go to Russia after receiving threats in the US.
Biden has strongly denied Reade’s allegations, and no ex-Biden staffer has come forward to say they ever witnessed or heard about any kind of sexual misconduct in his Senate office.
In an interview with MSNBC in 2020, Biden said he is “saying unequivocally, it never, never happened. It didn’t. It never happened.”
Reade later faced credibility questions of her own including about her education and other credentials.
After being out of the headlines for years, Reade turned up in Moscow on Tuesday, where she sat alongside convicted Kremlin spy Maria Butina and answered questions from Russian state media over several hours.
During the news conference, Butina promised to discuss the possibility of granting Russian citizenship to Reade and ask Putin “to fast track her citizenship request.”
Butina was sentenced to 18 months in a US prison in 2019 for conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent, and now serves in the Russian parliament in President Vladimir Putin’s party.
Reade said she decided to come to Russia following death threats she received this year after she reiterated her accusations regarding Biden and announced on Twitter that she was willing “to testify under oath in Congress if asked.”
“When I got off the plane in Moscow, for the first time in a very long time I felt safe, and I felt heard, and I felt respected. That has not happened in my own country,” Reade said.
CNN cannot verify Reade’s claims of receiving threats on her life.
Reade said that “this illusion of Russia as an enemy is propagated by a few Washington elites who are determined to cause problems.”
