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Donald Trump’s Ex-Wife Ivana Fights Back Against Marital “Rape” Report: “Totally Without Merit”

Donald Trump, Ex-Wife Ivana Challenge Marital "Rape" Allegation

Donald Trump is under the microscope again. Adding to the Republican presidential nominee hopeful’s laundry list of controversies is a new report in The Daily Beast this week that largely cites the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, and includes 30-year-old allegations that he raped Ivana Trump while they were married.

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In The Daily Beast article posted Monday, July 27, Ivana, 66, is said to have asserted during a deposition during their early 90s divorce trial that Donald, 69, raped her. As recounted in Harry Hurt III’s Lost Tycoon, Donald confronted his then-wife for referring him to a plastic surgeon who performed a scalp reduction surgery that went horribly wrong. “Your f–king doctor ruined me,” Donald is said to have told Ivana after the procedure to remove a bald spot.

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Lost Tycoon then details the “violent assault” that followed, in which Donald allegedly physically restrained his wife and pulled out clumps of her hair. He also reportedly became sexually aggressive. “Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified . . . It is a violent assault,” Hurt wrote. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.'”

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Donald denied the exchange to Newsday in 1993, and his camp — also speaking on Ivana’s behalf — was just as firm in their rebuttal when reached by Fox News. Michael Cohen, special counsel for The Trump Organization, accused The Daily Beast of overexaggerating the decades-old scenario. “It’s not the word that you’re trying to make it into,” Cohen told The Daily Beast, clarifying that Ivana was talking about how ‘she felt raped emotionally . . . .She was not referring to it [as] a criminal matter, and not in its literal sense, though there’s many literal senses to the word.”

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Cohen argued in his statement to The Daily Beast that a man cannot rape his wife, citing “very clear case law.” In fact, a New York marital rape exemption to the law did formerly exist, but it was struck down in 1984.

Ivana Trump and Donald Trump 1987
Ivana Trump and Donald Trump at Forbes Magazine’s 70th Anniversary Celebration, May 28, 1987.

Ivana, for her part, dismissed the report as “totally without merit” in a statement issued via Cohen on Tuesday. “I have recently read some comments attributed to me from nearly 30 years ago at a time of very high tension during my divorce from Donald. The story is totally without merit,” explained the socialite, who was married to the businessman from 1977 to 1992.

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“Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised three children that we love and are very proud of. I have nothing but fondness for Donald and wish him the best of luck on his campaign,” Ivana, the mother of Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr., continued. “Incidentally, I think he would make an incredible president.”

In its resurfacing of the report this week, The Daily Beast noted that Ivana asked that her statements be softened just before Lost Tycoon was published. She “felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent,” but did not want her comments “to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense,” The Daily Beast said.

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