First lady Melania Trump responded to an unflattering tell-all book by a former aide by dismissing it as a “book of idle gossip trying to distort my character.”
“We all know that more often than not, information that could be helpful to children is lost in the noise made by self-serving adults,” she wrote in a Friday morning blog post. “I have most recently found this to be the case as major news outlets eagerly covered salacious claims made by a former contractor who advised my office.”
“A person who said she ‘made me’ even though she hardly knew me, and someone who clung to me after my husband won the Presidency,” Trump continued in an apparent reference to former aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s book Melania and Me.
“This is a woman who secretly recorded our phone calls, releasing portions from me that were out of context, then wrote a book of idle gossip trying to distort my character,” the first lady wrote. “Her ‘memoir’ included blaming me for her ailing health from an accident she had long ago, and for bad news coverage that she brought upon herself and others. Never once looking within at her own dishonest behavior and all in an attempt to be relevant. These kinds of people only care about their personal agenda — not about helping others.”
She also criticized the media for the amount of coverage dedicated to the salacious publication, accusing them of choosing “pettiness.”
“Once again, outlets chose to focus their coverage on pettiness over my positive work,” Trump said. “There are plenty of opportunists out there who only care about themselves, and unfortunately seek to self-aggrandize by knowingly taking advantage of my goodwill.”
Trump added that the book, and the media’s coverage of it, “takes away” from the work she is doing to “help children” through her Be Best campaign.
“Anyone who is focused on tearing things down for their own gain, after knowing what I stand for, has lost sight of what we are here to accomplish and who we are here to serve,” she wrote. “To push forward a personal agenda that attempts to defame my office and the efforts of my team, only takes away from our work to help children.”
The Justice Department sued Winston Wolkoff over her book and released audio tapes of the first lady accusing her of breaking a nondisclosure agreement that Winston Wolkoff claims had been terminated at the time of the book’s publishing.
