Melania Trump has revealed how Donald slipped away from his glamorous blonde date to ask for her number the first time they met at a New York Fashion Week party in 1998.
Then 28, Melania refused to give the smooth-talking tycoon her number but agreed to take his business card after chatting to him about her family back in Slovenia.
A few weeks later, she contacted Trump, then 52, and they went out on their first date. By 2005, the couple were wed and the Slovenian model was the third Mrs Trump.
Melania tells the story of their “meet-cute” in her eponymous new book. She admits to feeling “giddy with joy” after that first meeting at Manhattan’s trendy Kit Kat Club, where she recalled finding an “instant connection” with the property millionaire.
“I think he appreciated that I had knowledge and experience under my belt, maybe he saw me as someone he could have more in-depth conversations with?” she writes of Trump’s reasons for abandoning his date for her.
She writes that she was tired after a trip to Paris and almost didn’t go to the party with a friend but she couldn’t resist the glamour of a Fashion Week party.
Trump introduced himself while still with his blonde girlfriend, saying: “Hi. I’m Donald Trump. Nice to meet you.”
“I knew he was a businessman or celebrity, but not much else,” she writes. But she adds that it was “a brief encounter that left a lasting impression.”
She couldn’t contact Trump immediately as she was leaving for a photoshoot in the Caribbean, but she writes: “The thought of contacting him added a sense of anticipation to returning.”
When she finally called, he chided her, saying: “Why didn’t you call sooner? I was thinking about you.”
They finally got together for a trip out of the city to see a golf club he was thinking of buying in Bedford, New York.
“He was so easy to talk to and genuinely interested in everything,” she writes.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
