Michael Cohen’s 24-year-old daughter says her relationship with President Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump has never been a good one, describing her as a “cold” person.
“She was incredibly icy towards me,” Samantha Cohen told CNN host Alisyn Camerota on Monday. “She never paid me much attention. If I saw her in the lobby without my father, she just looked past me and ignored me. There was never any warmth or recognition that I got from her. And I think that that’s something that other people who know her say as well. She’s just — she’s cold. I always felt like maybe I wasn’t good enough for her attention, but that was my impression.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair about her family’s relationship with the Trumps, Cohen laid out a number of impressions she got from growing up close to the family, including her friendship with Tiffany Trump and alleged inappropriate comments made about her body by Ivanka Trump’s father.
The interview came shortly after the release of a tell-all memoir by her father, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, titled Disloyal. The elder Cohen wrote the book while serving a prison sentence in upstate New York for admitting to financial crimes and lying to Congress. He is now serving the remainder of the sentence in home confinement.
In the Vanity Fair interview, Cohen said she thought that it was strange that Ivanka Trump was cold to her while maintaining a relationship with her father.
She recalled a “phony and gross” interaction a few months before her father was sentenced during which Ivanka Trump expressed her condolences about what was happening.
“She grabbed my arm and said, ‘We all feel so terribly about what’s happening to your dad. Our hearts are breaking for him. I’m so sorry that this happened to you guys,’ in this high-pitched, sugary voice,” Cohen said. “I knew how fake it was. I have no idea why she said that to me because I know she doesn’t care, and it was too late to send a message to my dad.”
Cohen also highlighted her friendship with Tiffany Trump, whom she grew close to in college.
She claimed that Trump had a strained relationship with her father because she grew up with her mother, Marla Maples, in California and that she was “disappointed” to see her supporting the rhetoric around her dad’s presidential campaign.
“When I see her speaking at the RNC, I know there’s no way she believes that shit,” Cohen told Vanity Fair. “She has friends who are gay. She’s an Ivy League-educated woman. There’s no way that she thinks that any of this is a good idea, and her dad treated her like shit her whole life.”
She added that she thinks Trump may be going along with her father’s campaign to win his approval, something Cohen claims she never had to deal with while growing up.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up being, I guess, unwanted by your family,” Cohen told CNN. “My dad has never been anything but the best father in the entire world to me. I can’t relate with that feeling of wanting it so badly that you’ll go along with anything.”
The White House has worked to distance itself from Michael Cohen and painted his book as being full of “lies.”
