Interest in Melania Trump‘s possible divorce payout has been renewed after rumors swirled that the first lady is planning to divorce Donald Trump. Experts estimate that Melania could receive $50 million if she ends her marriage with the president.
After Trump lost the presidential election, ex-White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed that “Melania is counting every minute until he is out of office and she can divorce.”
“If Melania were to try to pull the ultimate humiliation and leave while he’s in office, he would find a way to punish her,” Manigault Newman said, according to The Mail On Sunday. During an appearance on British TV show Lorraine. “What I have observed in the last 17 years would make your head spin. Sometimes they like each other but sometimes she is repulsed by him.”
Melania’s former friend and adviser Stephanie Winston Wolkoff claimed that the couple sleeps in separate beds and has a “transactional” marriage.
“Donald got arm candy. Melania got two dynamic decades,” Wolkoff told BBC.
During the president and first lady’s recent outing for the wreath-laying ceremony on Veterans Day, Melania stoked rumors by holding the arm of a serviceman instead of her husband’s.
If these rumors are true, experts estimate that Melania could receive $50 million in a potential divorce, which would be more than either of Trump’s former wives. A Town & Country article from 2018 stated that Trump’s first wife (and mother to Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka) Ivana Trump received $14 million in their divorce. She was also awarded an apartment in New York, a mansion in Connecticut and a Mar-a-Lago once-a-year stay, plus $650,000 annually for alimony and child support. Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples (mother to Tiffany) was awarded about $2 million. Both women reportedly contested their prenups, but were probably awarded the money the prenup allowed for, according to experts.
One divorce lawyer, Jacqueline Newman, told Town & Country that Melania could also receive real estate from Trump for her and Barron to live in: “In situations where I’ve dealt with very high-income, high-asset cases, the moneyed spouse will purchase an apartment for the non-moneyed spouse and the children to live in.”
Newman said that Melania would likely to get primary custody of their 14-year-old son, and could possibly receive an additional pay-out to help take care of him. “In this situation, if she has $50 million, she can afford to buy something,” the lawyer said. “But $50 million, while it’s definitely a lot of money, in New York City, for what she’s used to, she wouldn’t be able to replicate what she has now. He probably had a good sense of what kind of lifestyle they’d be living, so I would imagine the payout would be fairly generous.”
