Dark past dogs Trump man’s girl
Actress fiancée of Steven Mnuchin lambasted
WASHINGTON: Donald Trump’s new treasury secretary is engaged to a British actress accused of fabricating a racist memoir about her gap year, it has emerged.
Louise Linton, the fiancée of billionaire banker-turnedfilm producer Steven Mnuchin, was lambasted earlier this year after releasing a book about her time in Zambia as a teenager.
The 35-year-old claimed in the self-published book, In Congo’s Shadow, that her “dream gap year” turned into a nightmare when she had to flee armed rebels from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.
Linton, who was educated at Tony Blair’s old public school, Fettes College, said she had intended the book to be the inspiring memoir of an intrepid teenager who abandoned her privileged life in Scotland to travel to Zambia.
Instead she described how, as an 18-year-old volunteer in 1999, she was forced to hide from Hutu militia, writing that, if discovered: “I would be raped. I would be cut down. Smirking men with deadened eyes would brutalise me before casting me aside like a rag doll.”
In an extract from the book published online, she described her terror at what the rebels would do to the skinny white muzungu (Caucasian person) with long hair.
The book infuriated Zambians and other Africans, who claimed it was both racist and riddled with inaccuracies.
They ridiculed her claims that Zambia had monsoons and 30cm spiders, as well as her setting of the bloody Tutsi-Hutu conflict in DRC when it took place in Rwanda.
Gerard Zytkow, who lived near a park Linton described in her book, contradicted her claims and said there had been no heavily armed men in the area.
“Part of me feels sorry for this delusional young girl,” he added. “But in fact I would like to wring her neck for writing so much rubbish.”
Linton, who had a small role in 2007 film Lions for Lambs, was dismissed as having a “white saviour complex”. The Zambian High Commission in London accused her of “tarnishing the image of a very friendly and peaceful country”.
Linton, whose parents tur ned crumbling Melville Castle near Edinburgh into a luxury hotel, withdrew the book and apologised for any offence. Her agent said yesterday she had been “unfairly targeted”.
In 2009, she was photographed wearing knickers and a garter belt for men’s magazine Maxim, which dubbed her “the hottest thing to come out of Scotland since microwaved haggis”.
Twice-married father-ofthree Mnuchin, 53, was the national finance chairman of Trump’s campaign.
As a partner at Goldman Sachs he was accused of preying on struggling homeowners during the financial crisis, by buying a bank that then foreclosed on their properties.
A Democrat spokesman called his appointment a “slap in the face” to voters who hoped Trump would shake up Washington.
Mnuchin, who invested in films including Avatar, lost millions in a studio that went bankrupt.
Friends claimed that before his appointment to the cabinet, he had joked his wedding to Linton may take place on the White House lawn.
Meanwhile Russia and China could paralyse the US military by attacking America’s outdated satellites, Trump has been warned. Defence chiefs have told the president-elect that Moscow and Beijing have developed weapons designed to take out unprotected satellites. – Daily Mail