Ivana Trump

• 1. Introduction

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  Ivana Trump, a Czech-born businesswoman, socialite and model, appeared as herself in the 1996 film The First Wives Club. Her one line was aimed straight at the audience: "Ladies, you have to be strong and independent. And remember: don't get mad, get everything."

  The joke landed because her own divorce had been one of the most closely followed breakups of its era. Yet the headlines flattened a far more tangled life. She grew up under communist rule, built a career in several countries, and drew the attention of two intelligence services.

  How did a girl from a Czechoslovak city end up running a casino resort on the American coast? Which of the stories she told about herself survive a check against the record? And what did she make of her name once it belonged to her alone?

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• 2. Skis and Passports

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  Ivana Marie Zelníčková was born on the 20th of February 1949 in Gottwaldov, a Czechoslovak city that is now called Zlín. Her father, Miloš Zelníček, was an electrical engineer, and her mother, Marie, worked as a telephone operator. The family was Catholic.

  Her father steered her toward skiing when she was four years old. The skill carried her onto the junior national ski team, which brought a rare chance to travel beyond the borders of the communist state. She later studied at Charles University in Prague and earned a master's degree in physical education in 1972. In 1970 she also appeared on Czechoslovak Television, in the children's series Pan Tau.

  In 1988, she told journalists that she had been a substitute on the Czechoslovak ski team at the 1972 Winter Olympics, competing in downhill and slalom. The claim does not hold up. Czechoslovakia sent only four women to those Games, and none were alpine skiers. In 1989, Petr Pomezný, Secretary General of the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee, said that an extensive search had turned up no record of her. Snopes reached the same conclusion in 2021.

  Her route out of the country was a paper marriage. In 1971 she wed Alfred Winklmayr, an Austrian ski instructor and a platonic friend, so that she could obtain a passport. The arrangement let her leave without defecting, which preserved her right to come back and visit her parents. As Ivana Winklmayr, she received her Austrian passport in March 1972. In August 1973, she obtained an absentee divorce in Los Angeles, where he had moved to teach skiing.

  That same year, a car accident killed Jiří Štaidl, a lyricist and playwright with whom she had been romantically involved. After his death she moved to Canada, where she lived with George Syrovátka, whom she had dated since 1967. He had defected to Canada in 1971 and owned a ski boutique in Montreal. She described herself as his wife at the time, though the two never married.

  In Canada she worked as a ski instructor and spent two years in Montreal, polishing her English in night courses at McGill University. She also modelled. Her clients included the department store Eaton's and the designer Auckie Sanft, and she did promotional work for the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. In 1975 she told the Montreal Gazette that she saw modelling as a job rather than a career.

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• 3. Partner and Executive

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  In 1976, Ivana was in New York City with a group of models when she met Donald Trump. They married on the 9th of April 1977 at Marble Collegiate Church, with Norman Vincent Peale officiating.

  Throughout the 1980s the couple were tabloid fixtures in New York society, and they also worked side by side. Their joint projects included Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the renovation of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York, and the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

  Ivana spent seven years as a senior executive in the Trump Organization, including a post as executive vice president for interior design. She led the interior design of Trump Tower, whose signature feature was pink marble. She was then appointed CEO and president of the Trump Castle Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, and later managed the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

  A reviewer of the 2018 Netflix miniseries Trump: An American Dream described her as "a charismatic workaholic, a career woman, an equal." The same review portrayed her as a partner Trump had deliberately chosen to "work beside him and challenge him."

  The couple had three children: Donald Jr. in 1977, Ivanka in 1981 and Eric in 1984. Their mother's native language passed down unevenly. Donald Jr. became fluent in Czech with the help of his maternal grandfather. Ivanka gained only a basic understanding, and Eric never learned it, because his grandparents were comfortable speaking English. Ivana herself became a naturalized United States citizen in 1988.

  Decades later, after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he offered her the post of ambassador to her native Czech Republic. She turned it down.

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• 4. The Divorce

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  Over the Christmas holidays of 1989, onlookers saw the Trumps fighting after Ivana came face to face with Donald's mistress, Marla Maples. The marriage became public property overnight.

  By February 1990, according to the Chicago Tribune, Donald had locked Ivana out of her office at the Plaza Hotel. A legal fight followed over whether the four prenuptial agreements the couple had negotiated, one after another, would stand.

  Personal loss arrived in the middle of the dispute. In October 1990, Ivana's father died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 63. Despite the pending divorce, Donald stood beside her at the funeral in Zlín that November.

  The case drew worldwide attention. New York tabloids put it on their front pages for 11 days in a row. The gossip columnist Liz Smith devoted all of her news coverage to it for three months.

  In a deposition connected to the divorce, Ivana accused Donald of rape. In Harry Hurt's book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, she confirmed that she had "felt violated." A later statement provided by Donald and his lawyers quoted her as saying she had used the word rape but did not want her words interpreted "in a literal or criminal sense."

  The uncontested divorce was granted in December 1990 on the grounds of cruel and inhumane treatment by Donald. As a condition of the settlement, Ivana signed a non-disclosure agreement and had to ask Donald's permission before discussing the marriage in public. The New York Times reported in 1991 that she received $14 million, a 45-room Connecticut mansion, an apartment in Trump Plaza, and the use of Mar-a-Lago for one month each year.

  Mar-a-Lago would reappear in her story nearly two decades later, as the setting for a wedding.

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• 5. Under Watch

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  On the 14th of February 1989, FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, recommended a preliminary inquiry into Ivana's connections to Czechoslovakia, based on a confidential source. The New York Field Office opened the inquiry the following week, and it is reported to have run for at least two years. It was not public knowledge until March 2023, when it emerged that the FBI's counterintelligence division had investigated allegations tied to her native country.

  The interest was not only American. Czechoslovakia's intelligence service, the StB, spied on her in the 1970s and 1980s whenever she visited her father.

  One of its informants, who used the cover name Lubos, reported to his superiors in 1977 about her early life. His account covered a job at a petrol station in Austria and her emigration to Canada.

  According to The Guardian, the StB had another source close to her. Her own father, Miloš, was reportedly an informer who passed along information from his daughter. Among it was a correct prediction that George H. W. Bush would win the 1988 presidential election.

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• 6. Selling Ivana

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  Soon after her 1990 divorce, Ivana turned her name into a business. She developed lines of clothing, fashion jewelry and beauty products, which were sold through television shopping channels including the Home Shopping Network and QVC London. In 1995 she presided over The House of Ivana, a fashion and fragrance company with a showroom on Park Avenue in New York.

  In 1998 she looked toward Croatia, a vacation destination her parents often visited. There she bought a 33 percent stake in Polo+10, the country's second-largest daily newspaper.

  Not every venture succeeded. The Ivana-branded Bentley Bay development in Miami, Florida, filed for bankruptcy in 2004. The next year she was attached to several proposed condominium projects, including an Ivana Las Vegas that was never built. In 2010 she sued the Finnish fashion company Ivana Helsinki, accusing it of selling women's clothing that used her name without permission.

  She was also a prolific writer. Her books included For Love Alone in 1992 and Free to Love in 1993. In 1995 came a self-help book, The Best Is Yet to Come: Coping with Divorce and Enjoying Life Again.

  From June 1995 to January 2010, she wrote an advice column about love and life for the tabloid Globe, titled "Ask Ivana." In February 1999 she launched a lifestyle magazine, Ivana's Living in Style, and in 2001 she contributed an advice column to Divorce Magazine.

  Her 2017 autobiography, Raising Trump, covered her own upbringing and the early years of raising her children with Donald. Its subtitle claimed a title for her: Family Values from America's First Mother.

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• 7. Camera Time

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  In April 1988, Ivana and Donald sat together on The Oprah Winfrey Show. A month later, in May 1988, they appeared on the BBC's Wogan.

  After the divorce she gave an interview to Barbara Walters for the ABC program 20/20. In 1991, Donald responded by cutting off her alimony payments and announcing that he intended to sue her for damages. She went back to The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1992 with a defiant message: "I will not let men dominate me anymore."

  Her screen work took in comedy and reality television. After her cameo in The First Wives Club, a 1996 television movie, For Love Alone: The Ivana Trump Story, dramatized her life. In 2006 she hosted a reality special on the Oxygen Network called Ivana Young Man, in which she helped a wealthy, middle-aged woman find a younger partner.

  In 2010 she joined the British series Celebrity Big Brother 7 and finished in seventh place.

  Actors have also played her. Katheryn Winnick portrayed her in the 2005 television film Trump Unauthorized, and Maria Bakalova played her in the film The Apprentice.

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• 8. Later Loves and Farewell

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  In November 1995, Ivana married the Italian entrepreneur Riccardo Mazzucchelli. They divorced in 1997, and the split turned litigious. She filed a $15 million breach-of-contract suit, alleging he had violated the confidentiality clause in their prenuptial agreement. Mazzucchelli sued both Ivana and Donald for libel in a British court. The dispute was settled on undisclosed terms.

  In the summer of 1997, she began dating the Italian aristocrat Count Roffredo Gaetani dell'Aquila d'Aragona Lovatelli. Their relationship lasted until his death in 2005.

  On the 12th of April 2008, she married the Italian actor and model Rossano Rubicondi, after six years together. He was 36 and she was 59, making him 23 years her junior. The $3 million wedding, for 400 guests, was hosted at Mar-a-Lago by her ex-husband Donald. Ivanka was maid of honor, and Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Ivana's former sister-in-law, officiated.

  The couple divorced in less than a year, but their on-again, off-again relationship continued until 2019, when Ivana announced they had once more called it quits. Rubicondi died on the 29th of October 2021, at the age of 49, reportedly from melanoma.

  By the late 2010s, Ivana reportedly divided her time among New York City, Miami and Saint-Tropez. She said she was fluent in Czech, English, German, French and Russian, and she had 10 grandchildren.

  On the 14th of July 2022, Ivana died at the age of 73 after falling down steep spiraling stairs at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The cause was blunt impact injuries to the torso. Donald Trump and their three children were among those who posted condolences, along with politicians and celebrities.

  Her funeral was held on the 20th of July at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, a Catholic church near her home. She is buried at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey. Her estate was worth $34 million. Most of it went in equal shares to Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric, with other beneficiaries including her friend Evelyne Galet and the family's former nanny, Dorothy Curry.

  The country she had left behind honored her afterward. On the 28th of October 2022, Czech President Miloš Zeman posthumously awarded her the Medal of Merit.

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