Nina Burleigh - Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women

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Gallery Books

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2018 by Nina Burleigh

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition October 2018

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Interior design by Jaime Putorti

Photo of Handcuffs Robert Llewellyn/Getty Images

Photo of Ivanka Trump -/Afp/Getty Images Photo Of Melania Trump Dimitrios

Kambouris/Wireimage/Getty Images Photo Of Ivana Trump Cindy Ord/Getty Images Photo Of Marla Maples By Jon Kopaloff/Filmmagic/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Burleigh, Nina, author.

Title: Golden handcuffs : the secret history of trumps women / Nina Burleigh.

Other titles: Secrets of the women of Trump Tower

Description: New York : Gallery Books, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018032323 (print) | LCCN 2018039444 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501180224 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501180200 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946 Relations with women. | Trump, Donald, 1946 Family. | Trump, Ivana. | Maples, Marla. | Trump, Melania, 1970 | Trump family. | Executives spousesUnited StatesBiography. | Presidents spousesUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC E914.T77 (ebook) | LCC E914.T77 B87 2018 (print) | DDC 973.933092dc23

LC record available at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__lccn.loc.gov_2018032323&d=DwIFAg&c=jGUuvAdBXp_VqQ6t0yah2g&r=7Powweyp97H7BrdRqAm-eJjycEUd2REgi140E_-eJsoFHotHpuSHVST6CEgk6PFC&m=DtGv38KLXqkUyiYjXpYgZfSRXniEp4p2ZQyy7ueAZJ4&s=nSYIgTw73oVYj9XYEC_2amaWoXpuzEAN2h0Tqt_zgPw&e=

ISBN 978-1-5011-8020-0

ISBN 978-1-5011-8022-4 (ebook)

For my girlfriends

A spring day in Manhattan. A small table covered with white linen inside a chic bote filled with women who throw on Dior and Louboutins and stroll over from Upper East Side aeries the way other women throw on jeans and sneakers for a trip to the Starbucks drive-through. Anyone can walk in, but not everyone can walk in unannounced and get a table. The matre d and his waitersall men, all with vaguely Mediterranean accents, French? Italian?possess a Diamond District appraisers eye for who really belongs. A nanosecond of a glance at a shoe or the warp and weft of a jacket determines whether and where a patron belongs.

A stunning woman is seated across the table from me. People stare when she walks in. She grew up like this: glorious, dizzying in her beauty, impossible to hide. One of the global billionaires plucked her out of a beauty pageantas they do. Prince Charming was married and whisked her far away. Extreme hijinks ensued, up to and including drug abuse, secret trips to hospitals, reluctant or forced participation in creative kink.

She escaped, and thanks to his money and her looks, resides among a slice of New York society where other leggy beauties attached to other men with big money live in the same few zip codes, shop at the same designer stores on 57th Street, party with bold-faced names, and grab casual lunches at exclusive, high-dollar restaurants the way Seinfeld and friends would hang out at Monks Cafe.

On the table in front of the woman is a pen and a piece of paper. We are here to talk about the Queens of Trumplandia, some of whom she knows.

But she wont actually talk. There are too many ears within earshot. The entire conversation will take place on pieces of paper, like a communication between prisoners. On the paper, she will scrawl the first initials of some of them. M. I. J. T.

She will draw maps and arrows, and scribble down words. After she writes something down and I indicate I understand, she will scribble it out. She will crumple up all the paper before we leave, and take it out with her.

The food will be delivered and left untouched. At one point she will spy a Trump Organization lackey, a man she knows well, and will draw an arrow on the paper in his general direction.

Im not supposed to turn around and look.

The stories she weaves about Trumps wives and daughter arent even that salacious. They hint at embarrassing secrets, private conflicts, but what she really wants to share is her own story. It is, it turns out, a common one among the great beauties in the realm she inhabits. It involves a kind of long-term enslavement that would, in a different social set, lead to, at the very least, a restraining order.

But it will not because of Money and Fear.

T he rich are different from you and me, Fitzgerald wrote in the 1920s. A century before the Jazz Age chronicler scribbled that line, French writer Honor de Balzac had a different way of putting it. Wealth has great privileges, Balzac observed, and the most enviable of them all is the power of carrying out thoughts and feelings to the uttermost, of quickening sensibility by fulfilling its myriad caprices.

To understand the lives and histories of the Queens of Trumplandia, one must understand the social and financial microcosm in which they exist, which I will call the Yacht People. The Yacht People are a sliver of the global one percent, and besides the Trumps and the Wall Street billionaires whose respect Donald vainly tries to win, and the wives and children of those billionaires, the club includes scions of the Nigerian kleptocracy and the British nobility, Russian oligarchs including Vladimir Putin, media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Saudi princes.

Their wealth is borderless, their nation anywhere with a tarmac and enough cell power to call their banker.

Those are the Yacht People. And then there are the Civilians, the 99 percent. That would be you and me. The ruleslaws and normsare different for the Yacht People than for the Civilians. That is because anybody with just $1 billion in net worth possesses a tranche of wealth greater than the gross domestic product of over 150 individual nations. The Yacht People all have multiple billions.