‘Lunatic’ Trump’s phantom lovers
Utterly bizarre but totally true: how the man who would be President posed as his own publicist to claim he’d slept with the world’s most desirable women... and is still lying about it 25 years later
RARELY has a US presidential nomination proved so divisive. As we reveal in this shocking exposé, Republican hopeful Donald Trump has surmounted a lifetime of absurd exaggerations, flimsy fabrications, outright lies, and worse. It is a devastating account of the laughable yet truly sinister world of The Donald…
DONALD TRUMP has spent decades creating and polishing his public image, and to maintain it he will distort information, contradict himself and block enquiries into his conduct, true wealth, business dealings – and even his relationships with women. It was such strategies that led to him lying on US television when, earlier this year, he was on the verge of becoming the Republican nominee for the US Presidency. And the subject in question? The impression he created that the world’s most desirable women were beating a path to his bedroom door…
The saga had started in late June 1991 with the news that Trump had just dumped his longtime girlfriend, Marla Maples, and had taken up with Italian model and singer Carla Bruni. It made newspaper headlines in America and even featured on NBC’s Today Show.
That major news organisations would report on the romances of a property developer is testimony to his success in creating public interest in his life – or at least those aspects he wants covered: Trump The Modern Midas and Trump The Great Don Juan.
Sue Carswell, a reporter for People magazine, called his holding company, the Trump Organisation, asking for an interview with the great man. Minutes later she was called back and turned on her tape recorder. The speaker identified himself as John Miller, and said he had just been hired to handle Trump’s public relations because The Donald was too busy to return calls himself, given ‘the important, beautiful women who call him all the time’.
He listed Madonna, actress Kim Basinger and Carla Bruni. For a freshly hired Trump publicist, Miller seemed exceptionally well-informed.
He gave detailed and nuanced observations on Trump’s emotional state, his relationships with various women, and eagerness to marry again.
Refuting a report that Trump had left his wife Ivana for Marla, Miller said Trump ‘really left for himself. He never left for Marla. He was going to leave anyway. Marla was there, but he was going to leave anyway. So now he has somebody named Carla who is beautiful… Carla is a very beautiful woman from Italy whose father is one of the wealthiest men in Europe.’
When asked for the name of the father, Miller paused, evidently realising he didn’t know it. ‘Her father’s name is… her name is Carla Bruni Fredesh,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to spell the last name.’
It was spelled Tedeschi. The father, Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, is a classical music composer and scion of an old industrial family.
MILLER said Bruni had a fling with Eric Clapton before starting ‘a big thing’ with Mick Jagger, ‘and then she dropped Jagger for Donald, and that’s where it is now. He’s not making any commitments to Carla, just so you understand’.
Bruni later said that Trump had indeed called her a few days before the interview. She told Trump her sister would be joining her in New York and, according to author Harry Hurt III in his book Lost Tycoon, Trump offered Bruni and her sister a room gratis at his Plaza Hotel close to Central Park.
Bruni accepted the offer, even though, as she later said, she had no interest in a liaison with a man she referred to as ‘the King of Tacky’.
Miller went on to tell Carswell that there was intense competition to become the next Mrs Trump. He said: ‘ When he makes the decision, that will be a very lucky woman… competitively, it’s tough. It was for Marla and it will be for Carla.’
Carswell knew almost immediately Miller was Trump. But before writing her account, she played her recording to the gossip columnist Cindy Adams. ‘That’s Donald,’ Adams said. After hearing the tape, Marla said she was ‘shocked and devastated… I feel betrayed at the deepest level.’ She doubted Trump was with Bruni. ‘I think he’s making this up to get a playboy image,’ she said.
Just days earlier, Marla had accompanied Trump to his birthday party in Atlantic City. She had been kept out of sight for years. Sometimes she appeared at public events where he was, but always with a man posing as her boyfriend to throw off suspicion that she and Trump were having an affair.
This was to be a triumphant night for a long-suffering mistress – her first public event with Trump as a couple, even though he was still married to Ivana.
They appeared happy at the party, but things must have deteriorated later. The next morning, the doors to their 26th-floor suite were off the hinges. Tom Fitzsimmons, a former boyfriend who often accompanied Marla to Trump events and who had come to accompany them to the airfield for the trip back to New York, found her in tears and Trump about to walk out.
After Hurt reported the incident, I checked with my own sources, who confirmed the fight and said there had been other arguments that left physical evidence.
Just days after the birthday party, NBC’s Today Show and the tabloids reported Trump had had it with Marla and had taken up with Carla Bruni. That set in motion the events that ended two weeks later with People magazine outing Trump as John Miller.
Carswell had caught ‘ Donald Trump posing as a fictitious PR man’ for himself. Soon after, Trump called Carswell and confessed.
More than two years after that episode, the competition to pick the next Mrs Trump ended. The winner was Marla, the mistress he had publicly humiliated more than once, and the only woman on John Miller’s list who had actually slept with Trump.
Two months before the wedding, she gave birth to Trump’s second daughter, whose future breast size Trump would later speculate about on TV.
Years later, Trump was handed an opportunity to clear up the matter of Bruni. Instead, he revived the myth that he’d had an affair with her. It happened during an appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show. Stern, his co-hosts and his guests engage in crude sexual banter, try to encourage women guests to show their breasts, and debate if they are aroused or turned off by women in the news.
In 2008, soon after French President Nicolas Sarkozy left his wife and just before he married Bruni, Stern asked Trump on-air why he was no longer with the actress.
RATHER than acknowledging they had never been together, he replied that Bruni was a ‘very flat-chested woman – not your kind of woman, Howard’. Trump disparaged Bruni’s bra size as ‘smaller than A cup – minus A’.
Stern asked if it was true Bruni had broken up his romance with Marla. ‘Not true,’ Trump said. Stern: ‘Did you date [Carla]?’ ‘May I say no comment,’ Trump said, laughing. Stern: ‘Did you date her?’ ‘I’m trying to be a diplomat for this country. Let me say no comment.’
‘I don’t understand something,’ Stern said, referring to a photo he was eyeing of Bruni in a bikini. Stern called her ‘magnificent’ and
asked Trump: ‘Is she not that hot?’
‘Well, let’s say that there are better... there are better by large margins,’ Trump said.
Stern continued: ‘ Why would Donald Trump stop banging Carla Bruni? She looks magnificent.’
‘Well, you stop when you meet somebody better… it’s a complicated thing. But I know Carla, and, um, but I don’t want to comment.’ ‘Was she bad in bed?’ Stern asked. ‘I can’t comment,’ said Trump. Stern asked why, giving Trump a perfect opportunity to come clean and be diplomatic at the same time. Instead, Trump said: ‘She’s gonna marry the President of France. I want to have good relationships with France, right. I don’t want to be criticising the First Lady of France.’
Stern continued to ask what it was like to have sex with Bruni. ‘I know her well,’ Trump said, again implying they had been lovers, ‘but I can’t comment on that because I want to have good relationships with the wonderful country of France.’
Trump never told the simple truth that he’d never done more than talk to Bruni. He did not disclose that she had denounced him to his face, as Hurt and others reported, for planting stories about their nonexistent relationship.
‘Trump is obviously a lunatic,’ Bruni said a few months later. ‘It’s so untrue and I’m deeply embarrassed by it all.’
The reasons Trump was not forthright and candid are, ultimately, known only to Trump. But the Howard Stern Show was not his last opportunity to come clean.
The next time he was presented with a chance to set the record straight, Trump told a whopper on national television. This time, it served a specific purpose: to advance his pursuit of the Oval Office. Trump relies on two core strategies to manage the public image he has spent decades creating, polishing, and selling. In the first, he exploits a common weakness of news reporting: the recitation of ‘facts’ without analysis of that which goes unsaid. Trump often threatens to sue journalists, ensuring caution from publishers and broadcasters who want to avoid a costly lawsuit – even one Trump cannot win. This tends to discourage investigation beyond the official talking points.
In his second, Trump distorts information, contradicts himself, and blocks enquiries into his conduct by journalists, law enforcement, business regulators, and lawyers. Again, the record shows decades of Trump’s skill pursuing this strategy.
Trump put both to work in the days after he became the presumptive Republican nominee for President, after his last two primary opponents – Ted Cruz and John Kasich – dropped out of the race in May.
One Friday morning, Trump called NBC’s Today Show. A quarter of a century earlier, Today had reported Trump’s imagined affair with Bruni as fact, based on a story Trump had planted under a different name. With Trump as the presumptive nominee, that tactic was back in the news. The day before the Today Show call, The Washington Post had published a story about Trump posing as men named John Baron and John Miller. On its website, the newspaper posted the 1991 tape of Miller speaking to People magazine.
‘Is it you [on the tape]?’ Today host Savannah Guthrie asked.
‘No, I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time,’ Trump said.
Neither aspect of that response was true. First, Trump had long since confirmed to People magazine he had been posing as John Miller. Second, even if the accusation were false, it was not credible that Trump was hearing about the existence of the tape for the first time.
After his false statement to Guthrie, Trump continued: ‘It doesn’t sound like my voice. I have many, many people trying to imitate my voice and you can imagine that. This sounds like one of the scams.’
This deception fits into the long pattern of the way Trump conducts himself. Some celebrities use the
He claimed that Carla left Mick Jagger to be with him instead
one catch all that usually cannot be disproved: I don’t recall. That option would seem unavailable to Trump, since he declared last October that he enjoys ‘the world’s greatest memory’. His emphatic Today Show denials left no escape hatch. There was no equivocation, no request for time to check the record, no hint of faded memory. So what would prompt Trump to deny the allegation? Surely he must have realised that he’d be caught. Trump lied while on the cusp of becoming the Republican Party nominee for President, when his every public word would be captured and closely scrutinised. A classic public relations strategy is to confront damaging information by getting it out fully and fast so you can put it behind you. Turning hard fact into ‘who knows?’ is one of the most effective strategies for blunting bad news. Trump does not want reporters telling people, especially voters, about anything in his past that does not add a sheen to his marketing image. He dismisses questions about his past as beneath the dignity of journalists, even as he raises decades-old issues about the conduct of his Democrat opponent’s husband. Together, these strategies – muddying the facts and deflecting enquiries into past conduct – ensure his crafted public persona will not be unmade. He will not suffer the curtain to be pulled back to reveal a man who tricked society into thinking he was all wise and all powerful. That Trump might put out a tape and then deny his own voice may seem beyond belief. But that’s the strategy: get bad news out, muddle it, and hope people do not get a clear appreciation of the facts.