Ex-Trump Employee Speaks Out on His Treatment of Women
You also worked for Ivana Trump while they were married, right?
Yes. She was the president of the Plaza Hotel, and we were doing a massive renovation of it, and I worked for both of them. Donald was the owner and she was the president and they both had their own ideas about what to do there, and they usually didn’t agree. I was sort of torn between the two of them.
Do you feel like he stopped taking her seriously at some point?
It‘s not that he stopped taking her seriously so much as he, I think, resented her and decided that he was the boss and not her, and that he maybe gave her too much power.
Do you think that’s what doomed their relationship?
[laughs] Well, that and his fooling around.
Did you ever see him express sexism against Ivana?
Well, I mean, I know he made a joke about how he paid her $1 plus all the dresses she could wear or buy. He said stuff like that and she just sort of laughed it off.
You heard him joke that he paid her in dresses?
Yeah, that was on television and reported in the news and stuff like that. [Indeed, at a press conference announcing Ivana’s new position as the president of the Plaza, Trump was quoted as saying, “My wife, Ivana, is a brilliant manager. I will pay her $1 a year and all the dresses she can buy!” According to Vanity Fair, after the conference, Ivana called her friends crying and asked, “How can Donald humiliate me this way?” -Ed.]
I know he gave Ivana a hard time because toward the end of my being with her on the Plaza project, when we were finishing up the work and stuff, I went to see her and she was really under a tremendous amount of stress from dealing with him. I remember she was quite upset. I was not complaining about him, but I was sort of complaining about him — I said he’s giving me a hard time — and she said, “Barbara, you know, you only have to deal with him while you’re working here — I have to deal with him 24 hours a day.” And I sort of felt sorry for her because I could imagine the pressure he was putting her under. He used to fight with her and he would complain about her and stuff like that when we were doing the Plaza.
Can you tell me more about the problems you were having with him at that time?
They had to do with the job. I had a lot of problems with him during the period of building Trump Tower and [renovating] the Plaza. He was getting in trouble with his financiers and he was having this affair with Marla [Maples, his second wife] and he was very hard to deal with sometimes. There was this stone that he had selected — it was a fine stone, but it was a cheaper version of a very expensive stone, and when he saw it installed he got very angry and he yelled at me and he blamed me for making him look cheap and he said it was shit. He got very, very upset about that. I was surprised by how upset. But we would have fights like that all the time.