IN EARLY 1996, fashion photographer Matthew Atanian was swimming in the indoor pool at Zeckendorf Towers, the Gramercy Park apartment building where he lived. A man approached him as he stepped out of the water and said, with disarming bluntness, “Hello, my name is Paolo. How do you have so many beautiful girls?”
Atanian had seen him before in the building. He was about Atanian’s age, in his midtwenties, a handsome guy with slicked-back dark hair. Atanian had noticed that when the man swam laps, he was careful not to get his perfectly combed hair wet. Atanian was amused by the question. He photographed all kinds of beautiful models, many of whom were friends; they visited him at the Zeckendorf and looked gorgeous around the swimming pool. Atanian learned that Paolo’s last name was Zampolli and that he worked at Metropolitan. He had a taste for limos, exclusive nightclubs, and extravagant parties. Atanian was from Worcester, Massachusetts, and even in New York, he remained a low-key New Englander. In spite of their differences, the two men struck up a friendship. Another day by the pool, Paolo had a proposal. “Matthew, you need a roommate? I bring you a nice girl, not like the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in the model house. I bring you real girl. And she’s clean and normal and nice.”
It made sense to Atanian. His last roommate had just left, and he needed help with the rent. He understood the transient life of models, especially the ones arriving from overseas, and agreed to take in the new arrival, Melania Knauss.
Atanian remembered being surprised when Zampolli first brought Melania to his apartment. She was well past the traditional age for aspiring fashion models. And she was a curiosity. He liked her. She moved into a makeshift bedroom carved out of a small dining space and tucked behind a Styrofoam wall in their apartment. The previous tenant, Atanian’s pal who was a drummer in a rock band, had erected the faux wall between the kitchen and the dining area to create just enough room for a futon.
To get to her space, Melania had to walk through the compact galley kitchen of the 1,200-square-foot apartment. Atanian let her hang her clothes in a small coat closet. They shared the bathroom, which was off the living room, their communal hangout space. There wasn’t much privacy, which was awkward when Atanian brought girlfriends home. It was less a problem for Melania, who never brought anyone home.
Melania’s dream was visible many mornings from her kitchen window, where she could see the supermodel Paulina Porizkova, then the wife of Ric Ocasek, the lead singer of the rock group the Cars, exercising in her apartment. Five years older than Melania, Porizkova was part of the first wave of supermodels and in 1984, at age eighteen, became the first Central European woman ever on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s famous swimsuit issue. Born in Czechoslovakia, she was a lodestar for a generation of models from Central and Eastern Europe—and she had even married a rich, famous American man. Porizkova seemed to be living a fantasy life, outside the window of Melania’s little cubby. Going to casting calls and reliably paying her share of Atanian’s monthly rent, she saw success all around her. It was so close, yet it wasn’t hers.
Zampolli told me that he paid for Melania to fly to New York in the summer of 1996, when she was twenty-six. A lawyer working for Melania said she initially arrived on a visitor’s visa in August 1996 and by October she had been granted an H-1B work visa. Zampolli said that he arranged for the visa so that she could work for him at Metropolitan. Models are eligible for an H-1B if they can show “distinguished merit or ability” in their field. Those visas were much easier to obtain in 1996 than they are now.
Paolo Zampolli has been a rare constant around Melania for more than two decades. He said that two years after she arrived in New York, he introduced her to Donald Trump. Zampolli worked for a while in international development for Trump real estate projects. He also started his own real estate firm and in 2006 was in the news for using catwalk models to help sell Manhattan’s priciest condos and penthouses. The Italian is now an ambassador to the small Caribbean island of Dominica. He maintains extraordinary access to the White House and Mar-a-Lago. His Instagram account is proof of that access, featuring players in the ever-changing landscape of Trump World: Mike Pompeo, Wilbur Ross, Ben Carson, Rudy Giuliani, Kellyanne Conway, John Kelly, Rod Rosenstein, and even Fox News superfan Jeanine Pirro. He posts photos of himself with Trump, Melania, and Barron. He has been photographed in the Rose Garden and at Thanksgiving turkey pardons, and he displays online his engraved White House invitations. He is a special planet orbiting close to the Trump sun.
Zampolli often seems to act as if he is Melania’s image manager. He has been frequently quoted in news stories about Melania and seems to be one of few friends permitted to discuss her publicly. He talks and talks, often with his amiable smile, but always fiercely defending her, jousting with anyone who would question her or Trump, sometimes even threatening lawsuits.
Over the last two years, I always felt Zampolli’s presence close by. My conversations with people in New York, Paris, Milan, Vienna, and Slovenia seemed to find their way back to him. Zampolli’s allegiance is total. “Mary u know i love my President more then the mother of my child,” he told me in his typically exaggerated style in an email in 2019. He also offered some advice for this book: “the title should be OUR Magnificent FIRST LADY.”
He seems to have advised some people to make sure their memories are foggy. Atanian, now retired and living in Massachusetts, told me that Zampolli told him to “bury” the old days. Atanian said that he’d always liked Melania and that she “didn’t do anything wrong.” Despite Zampolli’s insistence, Atanian talked to me freely and candidly. “Now he is a politician,” he said. “Before he was just a model agent.”
From the moment Melania arrived in New York, Zampolli was always in her life. But even with his help, the New York modeling scene was a tough slog. On many nights, from her tiny makeshift bedroom, Melania Knauss would pick up the phone and dial the numbers she knew by heart: 011 to call overseas, 386 for Slovenia. Then her parents’ phone number in Sevnica.
As she sat and waited for the distinctive European ring, she could gaze out the window of the tenth-floor apartment and see the glittering lights of Manhattan high-rises. Melania had arrived in New York just as Mayor Rudy Giuliani (who later became Donald Trump’s personal lawyer) was making good on his promise to clean up the city. Times Square peep shows and sex shops were replaced by family-friendly stores like the Gap and the Disney Store, as well as movie theaters and restaurants. Crime was down; tourism and the stock market were up. The New York Yankees were marching toward their first World Series championship in almost twenty years, led by American League Rookie of the Year Derek Jeter.
After 11:00 p.m., the international calling rates fell dramatically. It was dawn in Slovenia, and Melania could talk to her mother before she left for her shift at the factory. One old friend said the combination of Melania’s “persistence” and her mother’s guiding hand helped her not lose sight of her goals. “So many other girls starting out in modeling in those days—eighty, ninety percent—would get confused, party too much, start dating left and right, never made anything of themselves. She was never like that.”
It was hard to be an ascetic in the hypersexualized world of modeling and fashion. But Melania came close, Atanian recalled. She was no recluse, but her taste ran more toward spending evenings watching Friends or reading fashion magazines. He admired her steady routine, which included eating seven fruits and vegetables a day. She didn’t drink alcohol. She walked around the house with weights on her ankles to keep her legs toned. Her focus seemed clear: to become a success. Melania was resolved and determined, to the point of sometimes seeming a little cold to those outside her small, closed circle.
Her late-night calls with her mother provided regular pep talks and strategy sessions with the most important influence in her life. Her mother gave her a lift as she navigated a competitive industry in a competitive city. Atanian had seen a parade of successful models through his camera lens, and he thought Melania didn’t seem to have “it.” Atanian recalled an old girlfriend who had modeled for Benetton and J.Crew. When she relaxed, she would often wear jeans and a man’s dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and “she looked like she had just walked off a set.” Melania, on the other hand, would try a similar style, and, to Atanian, it just didn’t look right. “She just couldn’t wear them in the same way,” he said. “That to me describes what the ‘it’ is.”
Every time a male friend met his beautiful Slovenian roommate, Atanian heard the same question. “You’re hitting that, right?”—asking if he was having sex with Melania. “I’d say no, I don’t feel any attraction to her whatsoever,” Atanian said. “And they’d always look at me in disbelief. Like she was so good looking that I’d be crazy not to try to get involved with her. No one ever would believe me when I’d say we were just friends.” And Melania routinely rejected the periodic advances of Atanian’s friends.
He was used to Melania walking around in her robe and bedroom slippers the same way Rachel and Monica, the characters played by Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, did on the hit TV sitcom Friends. They would order Chinese takeout. It was very much like dorm life. Sometimes he would take her picture as she modeled clothes her mother or sister had made for her, or in whatever she happened to be wearing. “It would be like, well, you’re a model and I’m a photographer, so let’s do what we do,” he said.
Atanian’s photos show a beautiful young woman, often without makeup, with no high-gloss finish. It wasn’t lost on either of them that Atanian was in a position to help a struggling young model. He did a lot of work for the magazine Marie Claire, and she would ask him, “Matthew, when can you send me through to casting?”
He told her that he had no control over such things, which wasn’t true. He simply didn’t want to see her get hurt. There was a wide gulf between commercial modeling and editorial modeling for high-end fashion photos in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, or even Marie Claire. “Melania was commercial at best. She was never going to achieve her dream of doing editorial,” Atanian told me, adding, “A true editorial model has a certain relationship with the camera lens, in her face and in the way she moves, as if the model gives life to the photograph with her sheer power and chemistry. There’s just something in the picture that you can’t describe, but certain models have it.”
Atanian, who now watches Melania on TV, believes that today she is still trying to assert herself as a supermodel, down to her stiletto heels and expensive clothes. “She always thought if something had a big price tag on it, it was beautiful. I learned from my mom, you can get something from Marshall’s, and if the right woman wears it correctly, it’s stunning. That’s how I can best describe an editorial model. She can transform the clothes, not the other way around. Melania just could never do that.”
A woman who worked as a booker for Zampolli at the time remembered Melania’s first year in the United States. A “road mom” to many newly arrived young models, she helped them with doctor’s appointments; some needed dentistry or wanted other cosmetic changes. She lent young models money and offered a shoulder to cry on—but not to Melania. “Melania was fully formed” and not in need of much help. “When she came, there was an air of she was a star already.” She was dressed exquisitely and expensively, not a hair out of place, no need for money, no complaining, no need for a place to live, no sense of struggle at all. “She was a completed product—she was very polished, very polished.” Even when this booker went to see Melania very early in the morning at Zeckendorf Towers, she would find her dressed in nice pajamas, not a T-shirt or anything less than perfect. Melania was formal—polite and sweet, but distant. “She never let her guard down.”
She also spent a lot of time alone. “She wasn’t friends with anyone, and you have to understand how unusual that is,” the woman added. Also, despite having worked for years in Europe, she had remarkably few photos in her portfolio. It was filled with “test shots”—professional photos, not published work.
ON A cold late fall day in New York while she was still living with Atanian, Melania agreed to a nude photo shoot that would cause ripples in the presidential campaign twenty years later. It is common for models to do nude photo shoots at some point during their career, and Melania was no exception. This job entailed posing for Max, a racy French magazine. Not only would she be naked, but she would also be asked to strike suggestive and provocative poses with another woman, a Swedish model named Emma Eriksson.
The photographer was Jarl Alé de Basseville, an eccentric personality who was briefly married to supermodel Inés Rivero, and for years dated actress Kiera Chaplin, granddaughter of screen legend Charlie Chaplin. “I always loved women together, because I have been with a lot of women who desired the ménage à trois,” de Basseville said of the shoot. Born in France, he knew many well-connected and wealthy people in the worlds of fashion, photography, and art.
Melania was not paid for the shoot, de Basseville said—a common arrangement for lesser-known models to gain exposure that can lead to other work. In a 2018 interview at the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, de Basseville told me that on the day of the shoot, Melania arrived at a rented apartment near Twenty-Sixth Street and Sixth Avenue in the afternoon. He remembered her as being “cold” during the shoot, not bantering much with him or the makeup artists and stylists in the room, but being professional and hardworking. Emma Eriksson later described Melania to reporters as quiet and shy. She said that the two of them hardly spoke during the shoot, which involved them lying together nude in several poses, cheek to cheek, with their arms around each other.
A second series of photos, taken at night on a rooftop, shows Eriksson wearing a black bustier and stockings and holding a whip. In some of the photos, Melania wears a tight-fitting floor-length gown by designer John Galliano, who became head designer at French fashion house Christian Dior. When Melania married Trump in 2005, she wore a Galliano dress.
In other photos from the de Basseville shoot, Melania wore white lace panties under an open coat. Some shots depicted the two women embracing lustily; in one, Eriksson appears to threaten to whip an anxious Melania. Full-length nudes of Melania show her holding her hands coyly in front of her crotch.
Max handed the photos to Ann Scott, a young French novelist and former model, and asked her to create a story to accompany them, an erotic fairy tale of sex and domination between two women, told from the point of view of Melania’s character. In Scott’s steamy fiction, the two women meet at a party and are drawn to each other. “Sitting on the edge of the bed, I timidly lifted my buttocks one after the other to let my underwear slide off… I opened my thighs and closed them around her waist. She began to pinch the tip of my breast between her fingers while her mouth tightened around the other… She slid along my stomach and placed her cheek on my hip. She stayed that way drawing circles around my belly button. Pensive. Then she went lower, propped up my hip with her shoulder, then plunged with her mouth and took me…” The story had nothing to do with Melania Knauss. It was very possible that she never saw the text or even knew exactly how Max would use the photos. But there she was, tantalizing the magazine’s readers.
The florid two-girl fantasy was laid out in an eight-page spread in Max’s February 1997 edition, which featured Cindy Crawford on the cover, her breasts covered by a small sweater, naked from the waist down, with nothing but a sheet between her legs. In the end, it was more reminiscent of the pages of Penthouse than of the art de Basseville said he intended. The Max photos remained a little-known part of Melania’s past until her husband decided to run for president. By then, de Basseville had run into trouble with the law and spent time in federal prison on charges of conspiracy to launder money and distribute Ecstasy. Journalists began contacting him for the photographs. The New York Post unearthed the photos, including several of the full-length nudes of the GOP front-runner’s wife, and published them on Saturday, July 30, 2016. Melania appeared nude on the tabloid’s cover, her nipples obscured beneath blue stars, under the headline “The Ogle Office.” The next day, another cover featured Melania’s nude embrace of Eriksson. “Melania Trump had an impressive body of work long before she met The Donald,” the Post noted drily.
The Max photo spread didn’t catapult Melania’s career, but she kept looking for ways to break through. Two women who worked with her at Zampolli’s agency said she always showed up for a casting and did get selected for some lingerie ads and catalog work. But there were also days when she would come into the agency and be given the time and place to audition but not get the job. Yet Melania always seemed unfazed. There were rumors that she had some wealthy boyfriend, maybe in Europe, helping her. People thought that this also explained why she never seemed interested in going out. Atanian, her roommate, had no memory of her mentioning a Paris boyfriend. He noticed that she did occasionally go to dinner, but she always came back home.
Atanian had always wanted a Ferrari, and Melania knew it, so for Christmas, she bought him a Hot Wheels selection of five toy Ferraris. She talked to him, posed for candid photos, shared stories about her family. But never confided anything too personal.
Federico Pignatelli, a wealthy Italian living in New York, said that Melania called him “the very first day she landed in New York.” They had a connection: his mother was from Slovenia. Pignatelli owned Pier59 Studios, a vast space in Manhattan. Some 2,500 ads a year were shot in his studios. For Melania, new to New York, Pignatelli was a fantastic contact to make. During an interview about his efforts to improve working conditions and rights for models, he mentioned that he knew Melania and had been struck by her poise. But what stood out for him, he said, was that “she was not one of these models that would just talk and talk and talk. She would only talk when she really had something to say.”
He said that she had the same serious work ethic that many young models from Central or Eastern Europe had at the time. “They were beautiful women and they were hungry to work,” said Pignatelli. “They were very disciplined; they really wanted to make money, and they were working very hard. Other models were a little bit less motivated.” Melania’s biggest problem was that she arrived in New York at age twenty-six, “a little too late for New York.” Pignatelli added: “Her career was really cut short by her meeting Donald Trump.” But he said that while that may have hurt her career, it gave her a family and a life that is “enviable, honestly.”
Melania’s gateway to New York modeling was Zampolli, but he had limited experience in big-time model management. He also soon had a serious falling-out with Thomas Zeumer, the president of his modeling firm. In a sworn affidavit, one of Zampolli’s bookers, Michele August, said that Zampolli knew “next to nothing about this business, and indeed was supposed to sit next to me to learn how the business operates, but he never did so.” She called Zampolli a “pure neophyte” who never “made any positive contributions toward the day-to-day operation of the business.” Others said similar things under oath.
Zampolli loved the glitz. He threw lots of parties and drove a Rolls-Royce. His models were invited to dinners, gallery openings, and high-profile social events. The restaurant Cipriani would offer half-price meals to models so they would linger at the bar. “We always had dinner parties, always at Cipriani—we were always out,” a booker told me. “People want to be around beautiful people. Someone would pick up the bill, I don’t know who did. It was a way to see and be seen.”
Zampolli told me that he met Donald Trump before Melania came to the United States. He was typically vague about the details. By the time Melania arrived in New York, Zampolli was already doing Trump-like work in courting the gossip writers at the New York Post’s Page Six. He would tip off reporters to celebrities at parties and then often appear in the newspaper photos next to them. He saw how Trump would use lavish parties, head-turning models, and outlandish stunts to get press attention and realized it could work for him, too. By my count, Zampolli has had more than one hundred twenty Page Six mentions since 1996.
In 1998, Playboy magazine named Trump and Zampolli two of “New York’s Top 10 Playboys.” These were ten men who the magazine believed “personify life, liberty and the pursuit of dreams.” It was quite a list, including Derek Jeter, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Sean “Puffy” Combs, and a Tribeca hotel owner who rented rooms to models only.
Melania, too, had finally gotten a break, the one that she hoped would build her career. Sitting on a red velvet couch in a dark lounge, apparently wearing little more than two rings, a thick diamond bracelet, and a stone-cold “what-are-you-gonna-do-about it?” look, Melania was nine stories tall, gazing out from a billboard on the side of an apartment building in Manhattan’s Times Square during July, August, and September of 1997. She held a martini in one hand and a Camel Light cigarette in the other, a wavy wisp of smoke curling up toward the ad campaign’s teaser language: “What You’re Looking For.”
In addition to the billboard, the ad ran in Rolling Stone and other magazines, as part of a campaign for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. The cigarette campaign was created as an alternative to the “Joe Camel” ads that R. J. Reynolds had run for years, which had come under fire as being geared toward kids. “Camel is embracing night life and sophistication and an urban feeling,” company spokesman Richard Williams told the New York Times. Dr. Robert Jackler, a researcher at Stanford University who studies the impact of tobacco advertising, told me “sex sells” and Melania’s cigarette ad is “seductive, sexually charged, urban sophisticated, edgy.” Melania was part of a particular subset of models the campaign was looking for. For a change, bookers weren’t focused on teens or models with the hollow “heroin chic” look. By law, models had to be at least twenty-five to advertise cigarettes. (The following year, most cigarette advertising was banned entirely in the United States.) R. J. Reynolds was taking no chances, and initially said it wanted models over thirty for its new adult-oriented campaign. But as one person involved in the campaign said, “It was hard to find a model over thirty who didn’t look like a mom.”
“There were certainly hundreds of twenty-five-year-old girls who wanted that job,” said an art director who worked on the campaign and was with Melania at the photo shoot. Melania had turned twenty-seven that April. “She exuded a lot of sexiness, but there was also a bit of composure and restraint to that,” the art director said. “It wasn’t sex-sexy, it was just sort of beautiful sexy.” She said she couldn’t tell if Melania was a smoker or just a good actress who made it seem like she was a smoker. “She played the part very well,” she said. “She smoked for us and she made it seem like she was doing it naturally.”
The photo campaign, shot by famed fashion photographer Ellen von Unwerth, was seen by the cigarette maker as a major success. One fan of the photo was clearly Melania herself. In April 2010, Regine Mahaux, a Belgian who frequently photographs the Trumps, was in their Trump Tower apartment. One photo Mahaux took was in what appears to be Melania’s dressing room, and in the background it shows that alongside roses and perfume on her vanity counter is a framed shot of Melania, about 8 × 10, from the cigarette ad that once towered above the crowds near Times Square.
A FREQUENT question in the worlds of modeling and fashion is whether models have had plastic surgery, including breast augmentation. In 2016, Melania denied having any surgery on her chest or face. “I didn’t make any changes… I’m against Botox, I’m against injections… It’s all me. I will age gracefully.” Three photographers who have worked with Melania told me that Melania did have cosmetic surgery and they saw the scars. Atanian said that in January 1997, she returned from a Christmas trip to Europe looking more buxom. After a model who knew Melania well got her breasts enlarged, Melania saw how she booked many more jobs and earned a fortune. The careers of many models changed after they had surgery. A half-dozen New York bookers, including some who worked for Zampolli when Melania was at his agency, told me they each had cosmetic surgeons on speed dial for their models, often sending them to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities where the prices were cheaper than New York City.
Atanian said that Melania lived with him for a year, and that he noticed during their last months together that her calls to her mother became less frequent and that she began going out more. He then left New York, returning to Massachusetts to take care of his ailing mother, and Melania found a new place to live. Atanian recalled that she moved to a one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone off Park Avenue, just south of Grand Central Terminal, on a cross street in the Thirties. He said that he talked to her on the steps there once, and that they stayed in touch and spoke on the phone off and on until the following year, when Melania’s life changed forever.