The Time Donald Trump's Ex-Wife Accused Him of Brutally Raping Her
During Donald Trump’s 1992 divorce proceedings, his wife provided a deposition that detailed an upsetting, ugly sexual assault. The episode was recounted in Lost Tycoon, a gossipy biography that’s now out of print—but you can read it right here.
After over two decades, Hurt’s book was back in the news after a Daily Beast reporter questioned Trump’s chief counsel Michael Cohen about the deposition (Cohen demurred, countering that one cannot rape one’s own spouse). But most of the voting public probably still isn’t familiar with this moment in Trump’s personal history, so we’re reproducing it below.
To set the scene, Trump at this time had just undergone a painful cosmetic surgical procedure to reduce the size of a bald spot, performed by a doctor recommended by his wife at the time, Ivana.
The “statement of Ivana Trump,” provided by the lawyers of Donald Trump and appended as a footnote, appears to claim that when Ivana used the term “rape,” she was referring not to the criminal act of rape, but something else that, even in 2015, remains pretty unclear.
Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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