Melania Trump says the
In an interview with DuJour magazine published on Tuesday, the wife of the presumptive GOP nominee said writer Julia Ioffe “provoked” her husband’s supporters after sticking her nose where it didn’t belong.
“I have thick skin. It doesn’t bother me if they write about me because I know who I am,” Melania Trump told DuJour. “But what right does the reporter have to go and dig in court in Slovenia in 1960 about my parents? They’re private citizens. If they go after me, it’s different. But to do that, it’s a little bit nasty, it’s a little bit mean.”
As TheWrap previously reported, Ioffe became the target of violent Internet threats after Donald Trump criticized her GQ profile of Melania, which revealed that she had a secret half-brother living in her native Slovenia.
Asked whether Melania would denounce her fans if they decided to go after the DuJour writer once the interview saw the light of day, Melania took a page out of her husband’s playbook, criticizing her supporters’ behavior while giving them a big ol’ Trump hug all at the same time.
“I don’t control my fans,” Melania said. “But I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I understand what you mean, but there are people out there who maybe went too far. She provoked them.”
Ioffe was bombarded with anti-Semitic online attacks after a white supremacist website called the Stormer wrote an article titled “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian Kike Julia Ioffe in
“They basically asked everyone to send me a tweet, saying how it made them feel,” Ioffe, who happens to be Jewish, told PRI’s “The World” last month, adding, “They said I’d make a good lampshade.”
According to Ioffe, Trump supporters began firing off “some pretty vile images in my email and Twitter feed.”
It didn’t help matters that Melania criticized Ioffe for invading her family’s privacy in a Facebook post soon after, in which she accused Ioffe of several unspecified inaccuracies and told her followers that “Ioffe, a journalist who is looking to make a name for herself, clearly had an agenda when going after my family.”
What scared Ioffe the most, she said, were phone calls in the middle of the night “regarding inquires I had supposedly left about caskets and homicide clean-ups at my house.” Other calls incorporated automated recordings of Hitler’s speeches.
“You know, as a journalist, this is what comes with the territory. This is just going after my religion and ethnicity,” she said.