Nearly a decade would pass before I saw my family again, in October 2009 at my cousin Ivanka’s wedding to Jared Kushner. I had no idea why I’d received the invitation—which was printed on the same heavy-gauge stationery favored by the Trump Organization.
As the limo I’d taken from my home on Long Island approached the clubhouse at Donald’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, which looked eerily like the House, I was unsure what to expect. Ushers handed out black shawls, which made me feel a little less exposed as I wrapped one around my shoulders.
The outdoor ceremony took place beneath a large white tent. Gilt chairs were lined up in rows on either side of a gilt-trimmed runway carpet. The traditional Jewish chuppah, covered in white roses, was about the size of my house. Donald stood awkwardly in a yarmulke. Before the vows, Jared’s father, Charles, who’d been released from prison three years earlier, rose to tell us that when Jared had first introduced him to Ivanka, he had thought she would never be good enough to join his family. It was only after she had committed to converting to Judaism and worked hard to make it happen that he had begun to think she might be worthy of them after all. Considering that Charles had been convicted of hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, taping their illicit encounter, and then sending the recording to his sister at his nephew’s engagement party, I found his condescension a bit out of line. After the ceremony, my brother, my sister-in-law, and I entered the clubhouse.
As I walked down the hallway, I saw my uncle Rob. My last exchange with him had been when he’d hung up on me in 1999 after I had told him that Fritz and I were hiring a lawyer to contest my grandfather’s will. As I approached him now, he surprised me by breaking into a smile. He put his hand out, then leaned down—he was much taller than I was even in my heels—shook my hand, and kissed me on the cheek, the typical Trump greeting.
“Honeybunch! How are you?” he said brightly. Before I could answer, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking that the statute of limitations on family estrangement has passed.” Then, bouncing on the balls of his feet, he smacked a closed fist into his open palm in a not-quite-accurate imitation of my grandfather.
“That sounds good to me,” I said. We spent a couple of minutes exchanging pleasantries. When we were done, I walked up the stairs to the cocktail reception, where I spotted Donald speaking to somebody I recognized—a mayor or a governor—although I can’t recall who it was.
“Hi, Donald,” I said, as I walked toward them.
“Mary! You look great.” He shook my hand and kissed my cheek, as Rob had. “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too.” It was a relief to discover that things between us were pleasant and civil. Having established that, I gave way to the next person in the lengthening line of people, some of them waiting to congratulate the father of the bride. But The Apprentice had just concluded its eighth season, so it’s just as likely that many of them were simply there for the photo op. “Have fun,” he called after me as I walked away.
The reception was being held in an enormous ballroom quite a distance from the hors d’oeuvres. Along the way I saw my aunt Liz in the distance, chasing after her husband. I caught her eye and waved. She waved back and said, “Hi, sweetie pie.” But she didn’t stop, and that was the last I saw of her. I walked past voluminous bunting and the highly polished dance floor and finally found my place at the second cousins’ table on the periphery of the ballroom. In the distance I could hear the occasional thwap of rotors as helicopters landed and took off.
After the first course had been served, I decided to find Maryanne. As I wound my way through the tables, Donald took to the stage to give his toast. If I hadn’t known who he was talking about, I would have thought he was toasting his secretary’s daughter.
I spotted Maryanne and paused. Fritz and I would not have been invited to Ivanka’s wedding without Maryanne’s approval. She didn’t see me until I was standing right in front of her.
“Hi, Aunt Maryanne.”
It took her a few seconds to realize who I was. “Mary.” She didn’t smile. “How are you?” she asked, her expression rigid.
“Everything’s great. My daughter just turned eight, and—”
“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
Of course she didn’t know I had a daughter or that I was raising her with the woman I’d married after my grandfather’s funeral and then divorced or that I had recently received my doctorate in clinical psychology. But she acted as if her lack of such knowledge was an insult to her. The rest of our brief conversation was equally tense. She mentioned that Ivana had missed Ivanka’s wedding shower but said, sotto voce, that she couldn’t discuss why.
I retreated to my table, and when I realized the vegetarian meal I’d ordered had not arrived, I ordered a martini in its stead. The olives would suffice.
Sometime later, I saw Maryanne, looking determined, head toward us as if on a mission. She walked straight up to my brother and said, “We need to talk about the elephant in the room.” Then, gesturing to include me, “The three of us.”
A few weeks after Ivanka and Jared’s wedding, Fritz and I met with Maryanne and Robert at her apartment on the Upper East Side. It wasn’t clear to me why Rob was there, but I thought perhaps he planned to make good on his claim that the “statute of limitations” on family estrangement had passed. I took it as a good sign, but as the afternoon wore on, I became less sure. We didn’t discuss anything that seemed pertinent. As we sat in the living room with its spectacular view of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maryanne made passing references to “the debacle,” as she called the lawsuit, but nobody else seemed eager to go down that road.
Rob leaned forward in his chair, and I hoped finally we were going to start dealing with the so-called elephant in the room. Instead he told a story.
Ten years earlier, Rob had still been working for Donald in Atlantic City when Donald’s financial situation was dire. His investors were getting hammered, the banks were after him, and his personal life was in shambles. When things were at their worst, Donald had called Rob with a request.
“Listen, Rob, I don’t know how this is all going to end,” he had said. “But it’s tough, and I might drop dead of a heart attack. If anything happens to me, I want you to make sure Marla will be okay.”
“Sure, Donald. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“Get her ten million dollars.”
I thought, Holy shit, that’s a lot of money! at the same moment that Rob said, “What a cheap bastard.”
Rob laughed at the memory as I sat there stunned, wondering how much money those people had. Last I’d heard, $10 million would have been one-third of my grandfather’s entire estate.
“Around the same time, Donald called to tell me I was one of his three favorite people,” Maryanne said. “Apparently he forgot he had three children.” (Tiffany and Barron were still to come.)
We never met with Rob again, but Fritz and I, separately and together, had lunch occasionally with Maryanne. For the first time in my life, I got to know my aunt. Not since I’d spent time with Donald while I was writing his book had I felt a little bit as though I were part of the family.
A couple of months after my aunts’ April 2017 birthday party, I was in my living room lacing up my sneakers when the front doorbell rang. I don’t know why I answered it. I almost never did. Seventy-five percent of the time it was a Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon missionaries. The rest of the time, it was somebody wanting me to sign a petition.
When I opened the door, the only thing that registered was that the woman standing there, with her shock of curly blond hair and dark-rimmed glasses, was someone I didn’t know. Her khakis, button-down shirt, and messenger bag placed her out of Rockville Centre.
“Hi. My name is Susanne Craig. I’m a reporter for the New York Times.”
Journalists had stopped contacting me a long time before. With the exception of David Corn from Mother Jones and somebody from Frontline, the only other person to leave a message before the election had been from Inside Edition. Nothing I had to say about my uncle would have mattered before November 2016; why would anybody want to hear from me now?
The futility of it annoyed me, so I said, “It is so not cool that you’re showing up at my house.”
“I understand. I’m sorry. But we’re working on a very important story about your family’s finances, and we think you could really help us.”
“I can’t talk to you.”
“At least take my card. If you change your mind, you can call me anytime.”
“I don’t talk to reporters,” I said. I took her card anyway.
A few weeks later, I fractured the fifth metatarsal of my left foot. For the next four months, I was a prisoner in my home, my foot elevated at all times as I sat on the couch.
I received a letter from Susanne Craig reiterating her belief that I had documents that could help “rewrite the history of the President of the United States,” as she put it. I ignored the letter. But she persisted.
After a month of sitting on the couch, scrolling through Twitter with the news constantly on in the background, I watched in real time as Donald shredded norms, endangered alliances, and trod upon the vulnerable. The only thing about it that surprised me was the increasing number of people willing to enable him.
As I watched our democracy disintegrating and people’s lives unraveling because of my uncle’s policies, I kept thinking about Susanne Craig’s letter. I found her business card and called her. I told her that I wanted to help but I no longer had any documents relating to our lawsuit years before.
“Jack Barnosky might still have them,” she said.
Ten days later I was on my way to his office.
The headquarters of Farrell Fritz was located in one of two oblong buildings sheathed in blue glass. Bitterly cold air pushed between them across the wide-open space of the enormous parking lot. It’s impossible to park anywhere near the entrance, so after I found a spot, it took me ten minutes to get to the lobby on my crutches. I negotiated the escalator and the marble floors very carefully.
By the time I arrived at my destination, I was tired and overheated. Thirty banker’s boxes lined two walls and filled a bookshelf. The room’s only other contents were a desk and a chair. Jack’s secretary had kindly put out a pad of paper, a pen, and some paper clips. I dropped my bags, leaned my crutches against the wall, and half fell into the desk chair. None of the boxes was labeled; I had no idea where to start.
It took me about an hour to familiarize myself with the contents of the boxes and compile a list, which required wheeling around the room on my chair and lifting boxes onto the desk while standing on one leg. When Jack stopped by, I was flushed and soaking wet. He reminded me that I couldn’t take any documents out of the room. “They belong to your brother, too, and I need his permission,” which wasn’t at all true.
When he turned to leave, I called after him, “Jack, wait a second. Can you remind me why we decided to settle the lawsuit?”
“Well, you were getting concerned about the costs, and, as you know, we don’t take cases on contingency. Although we knew they were lying to us, it was ‘He said, she said.’ Besides, your grandfather’s estate was only worth thirty million dollars.” It was almost word for word what he’d told me when I had last seen him almost twenty years earlier.
“Ah, okay. Thanks.” I was holding in my hands documents that proved the estate had actually been worth close to a billion dollars when he died; I just didn’t know it yet.
After I was sure he had gone, I grabbed copies of my grandfather’s wills, floppy disks with all of the depositions from the lawsuit, and some of my grandfather’s bank records—all of which I was legally entitled to as part of the lawsuit—and stuffed them into my bags.
Sue came by my house the next day to pick up the documents and drop off a burner phone so we could communicate more securely going forward. We weren’t taking any chances.
On my third trip to Farrell Fritz, I methodically went through every box and discovered that there were two copies of everything. I mentioned the fact to Jack’s secretary and suggested that it obviated the need to get my brother’s permission, which was a relief since I didn’t want to involve him. I would leave a set of documents for him in the unlikely event he ever wanted one.
I was just beginning to look for the list of material the Times wanted when I got a message from Jack: I could take whatever I wanted, as long as I left a copy. I hadn’t been prepared for that. In fact, I had plans to meet Sue and her colleagues Russ Buettner and David Barstow (the other two journalists working on the story) at my house at 1:00 with whatever I’d managed to smuggle out. I texted Sue with the news that I’d be late.
At 3:00, I drove to the loading dock beneath the building, and nineteen boxes were loaded into the back of the borrowed truck I was driving since I couldn’t work the clutch in my own car.