Melania's appalling in so many ways, but quit the misogynist shaming
- Karen Sole
- Apr 13
- 5 min read
She's unpleasant, cold, probably a fascist, venal and mendacious, a liar and grifter - that's a lot - but think a moment...
She, Melania is also a woman, who exists in a world fundamentally similar to the one Epstein’s victims live in. Maybe she woke up last Thursday and realised she’d been groomed and trafficked, passed around between male friends as a commodity. We know how many decades it takes for survivors to reach that point, don’t we? I’m not positing that as fact, just a possibility. I certainly felt her rage as being against Donald. Also just my story. She’s from Eastern Europe, got to the States when she was 17. Landed in a deeply sleazy milieu where a specific cabal of men used and abused girls and women. They did so as a matter of course, intentionally, with structural support in their businesses, and careful organisation, enabled by other major players in the modelling world. We know it is in, or from that social-scape that Melania met Donald, either the way she describes, or one or other of the various accounts of their meeting.
Top models Carre Otis and Stacey Williams say that the modelling world was and is a system for trafficking girls and young women into the orbit of rich, influential men, the owners of modelling agencies. [The Daily Beast, 06 April 2026.] Otis describes herself being trafficked to Paris, having her passport confiscated, being delivered to the agency boss’s house, having to pay for her accommodation, and being sexually abused by him, photographers, and others. The abuse, aka rape took place repeatedly in numerous situations and by numerous men until she completely broke down. Donald Trump, himself, Melania’s husband and President of the USA, boasts about his entitlement to walk into changing rooms of beauty pageants he ‘owned’ while the teenage participants were in various states of undress. He has talked of 12 being his cut-off age.
So they are introduced by someone, and presto, there they are, Melania and Donald Trump. She probably thought…well what did she think? We do not know. However, it seems clear that their meeting and coupling is in most respects a consequence of the entitled, louche, abusive and deeply misogynistic socio-economic subset he moved in, and that she was syphoned into. Yes, yes, of course we can fairly safely say she loved and loves the advantages of having a rich husband, and of extending the Trump brand to her own businesses. That does not erase her hazy even concealed trajectory, in which we can again safely say, she had little or no agency.
Her values and politics are awful, inasmuch as we have heard or seen her account of them. Be best doesn’t cut it. That is not relevant to my impetus for writing this piece. I am doing so off the back of two moments of social media discovery, if you like.
The first was an episode of The Lincoln Project, on 11 April 2026, in which an old man, Rick Wilson, referred to her as ‘sloppy seconds’ in reference to her effectively having been Epstein’s lover before Trump got to her. That is so profoundly misogynist; in the convenient vernacular, ‘slut shaming’. It’s shocking.
Rick, who uttered the words, sat smugly on, while his co broadcaster, Kate, who I assume had to quickly digest that disgusting language, and take the baton from him for the next sliver of their podcast. The Lincoln Project is described on Wikipedia as a ‘never Trump’, basically Republic aligned, definitely not Democrat aligned or progressive outfit.
The second jolt was a photomontage on Facebook: head and shoulders shots of first ladies Bush, Obama, Reagan, Nixon et al, all in traditional First Lady type jackets - except Michelle who is way too classy for that - juxtaposed to a full body length photo of Melania, nude. What’s the message?
The message is that a woman who once posed for nude photos had better watch out, for she is considered in a reflex reaction to have no right to be viewed as a person worthy of any consideration, let alone respect. Her sovereignty over her own body is stolen. Her body, our bodies, are in fact the cornerstone of every piece of misogyny that exists or ever existed. A woman’s past life, whatever it may be, if it involves any exercise of her free will - or entrapped or trafficked status - to take advantage of her beauty or sexuality, can and probably will be used against her at some time in the future. Her body is desired but degraded by men. Men close to her, or men who have never known her. And some women who have been captured by misogyny. In this casual, reflex reaction, any woman can be completely trashed with cyber wildfire speed. The matronly attire in public life is the only acceptable kind - unless you’re a teenage pop star or actor in which case the more sexualised the better.
Back to Melania. Her young life was probably troubled. She was undoubtedly mixed up with Epstein to degrees that are especially regrettable to her now, and if she was complicit in the crimes we know he committed, that’s another point not in her favour. Photos, documents and verified accounts of her closeness can validly be used to establish any part of any of the one thousand plus cases of trafficking, rape and other crimes.
The denigration and shaming of her for her sexual or professional history as a reflex in the manosphere without borders, embedded in the centuries old patriarchy is invalid, and disgusting, however awful anyone deems her to be in other respects.
However ‘bad’ Melania is now, remember the real criminals in the overlapping stories are Epstein, Zampolli, Casablancas, Brunel, et al, and the associates who joined them and enabled them in their criminal exploitation of girls and women. Maybe Melania will turn out to be one of them. Would that place her in the Virginia Giuffre, or Ghislaine Maxwell camp? Asking for a woman friend. At the moment, her entire ethos is horrible. Castigate her over her complicity in genocide, ICE actions, her stupid I don’t really care jacket and all the rest, as it is richly deserved. However, as much as she denies it, she was a victim of, or had scant or no agency in the midst of the basket of snakes she fell into as a minor.
So much of the misery in this world results from the power of the patriarchy over women and girls. Our bodies. Our sexuality. Our modesty or lack of it. Our public and private lives. We have to stay vigilant against its gross and finer manifestations, call it out, support women who are harmed by it, and call on men to call each other out for their transgressions . This will eventually create some positive change, despite the Andrews and Jeffreys and Donalds. A better world is possible.
"If I can't dance, I won’t be in your revolution" My paraphrase, original attributed to Emma Goldman
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