Journalist threatened for profile of Melania
After Trump and his wife condemned article, writer faced storm of racist abuse
“They said I’d make a good lampshade,” says Julia Ioffe. Ioffe is a journalist, who happens to be Jewish, and who happened to write a profile of Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, for GQ. She has since been inundated with insults and threats, many of them violent and anti-Semitic.
“Basically,” says Ioffe, “I woke up to find that the Daily Stormer, which is a white supremacist website, wrote a piece saying that I had attacked Empress Melania, the wife of their glorious leader — those are their words, not mine — and they basically asked everyone to send me a tweet, saying how it made them feel.”
Mrs. Trumpwas born in Slovenia as Melania Knavs. She changed her name to Knauss to help her modelling career. Knauss met Trump at a party in New York in 1998 and they married in 2005.
Ioffe interviewed Melania Trump for the story and travelled to Slovenia to interview people who knew her growing up.
Ioffe presents a picture of her as an intelligent, responsible, hard-working, intensely private woman, devoted to her family. Ioffe also got the first media interview with her illegitimate half-brother.
The Stormer’s headline reads: “Empress Melania attacked by filthy Russian kike Julia Ioffe in GQ!”
Immediately, Ioffe says, “I was getting some pretty vile images in my email and Twitter feed. You know, caricatures of Jews being shot, execution-style; a Back to the Future poster redone as Back to the Oven; suggesting I would look good on a lampshade.”
Ioffe’s family moved from the Soviet Union in 1990 to escape anti-Semitism.
In a post on Facebook, Melania Trump criticized the journalist for invading her family’s privacy and said the story contained numerous unspecified inaccuracies.
“While the tweets are disgusting and egregious,” adds Ioffe, “what’s been weirder has been the phone calls that I’ve been getting even late into the night regarding inquires I had supposedly left about caskets and homicide cleanups at my house.”
Other calls featured automated recordings of Hitler’s speeches.
Ioffe and GQ have yet to hear from the Trumps what they believe to be inaccurate in the story. “I don’t think and I don’t know that Melania Trump sent these anti-Semitic trolls to my virtual doorstep,” says Ioffe. “But she did express displeasure with my article. She named me. And this is what happened.
“This has happened to journalists before me, and I’m sure it will happen again.”