Ivana Trump in New York in 2007. Jason DeCrow / The Associated Press
Ivana Trump, the first wife of former U.S. President Donald Trump and mother of her three eldest children, who helped her husband build some of her iconic buildings, including the Trump Tower, has died at age 73, she said. Thursday Donald Trump.
“I am very sad to inform everyone who loved her, that there are many, that Ivana Trump has died at her home in New York City,” Trump said in a post on the social media platform Social Truth.
The couple married in 1977 and divorced in 1992. They had three children together: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.
“Ivana Trump was a survivor. She fled communism and embraced this country. She taught her children toughness and toughness, compassion and determination,” the Trump family said in a statement. He grew up under communist rule in the former Czechoslovakia.
Neither the Trump family’s statement nor the former president’s publication mentioned the cause of death, but a police spokesman said they found her dead on the stairs and that this bad game was not suspected.
The New York Times, citing unnamed law enforcement officials, said it looked accidental and could have fallen down the stairs.
The New York Fire Department said paramedics responded to a call at his apartment for a cardiac arrest.
Born Ivana Zelnickova, she grew up in Gottwaldov, Czechoslovakia, a city near Prague now known as Zlin, according to her biography published by CMG Worldwide, a celebrity business agency that represented her.
He spent much of his youth in competitive skiing for the Czechoslovak national system, then competed at Charles University in Prague, where he obtained a master’s degree in physical education and languages, according to CMG’s biography.
After college, she followed her love interest at the time, professional skier George Syrovatka, in Canada, and later began modeling for the Montreal-based Audrey Morris agency, CMG said.
During a model trip to New York in 1976, she met Donald Trump, CMG said, and they married nine months later.
Ivana Trump played a role in building Trump’s media image in the 1980s, when they were one of New York City’s most prominent power couples.
While Donald Trump credited himself with his first success in entering Manhattan’s highly competitive real estate market, Ivana Trump also played a major role in the family business shortly after her marriage, the New York Times reported.
She worked alongside her husband on the development of the Trump Tower, its iconic building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and other high-profile projects such as the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Times said. .
Ivana Trump was the vice president of interior design for the Trump Organization and managed the historic Plaza Hotel, which Trump acquired in 1988 while raising her three children.
Her divorce, which came after Donald Trump’s much-publicized affair with Marla Maples, whom he later married, was food for New York tabloids.
A New York judge cited Donald Trump’s “cruel and inhumane treatment” in granting Ivana Trump’s divorce application.
She appeared in the 1996 film “First Wives Club,” in which she tells three women whose husbands left them for younger women: “Don’t get angry. Get it all.”
In her divorce settlement, Ivana Trump received $ 14 million plus $ 650,000 a year to support her three children, a 45-room mansion in Connecticut, an apartment in Trump Plaza and the use of the Mar-a-mansion. Lago in Florida for a month a year, reports the New York Times.
Ivana Trump is survived by her mother, three children and 10 grandchildren, according to the family statement.
He married three more times, including one before meeting Trump in what he described as a Cold War marriage to obtain an Austrian passport. Their two subsequent marriages also ended in divorce.