Stormy Daniels told us to stop speaking for Melania Trump, and she's right It's odd that we remain so fixated on the inner workings of a marriage that doesn’t really affect the American people too heavily.

Liz Wolfe | Opinion contributor

In an interview with British tabloid The Mirror, Stormy Daniels — the porn star who allegedly had an affair with President Donald Trump while his wife, Melania, was tending to their newborn son, Barron — rebuked the news media for their constant fixation on the first lady and Trump’s relationship. Daniels said: "People should stop speaking for her. Maybe she’s happy. Everything we say about her is a projection."

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, continued: "The entire world would be interested to know what she feels. But if we never know, that is her right and I support it."

In January, news broke of the Daniels-Trump affair and subsequent hush money paid by Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, to Daniels. Since — and before — then, rumors have circulated that the Trumps have an unhappy marriage, and that Melania’s choice to be kept out of the public eye has less to do with her disinterest in the game of politics and more to do with a crumbling marriage riddled with spousal resentment.

But we have no proof of any of this, and Daniels is right: People should stop speaking for the first lady, especially those who call themselves feminists. There’s no need to project victimhood — at the hand of a broadly disliked president — onto a woman who can speak for herself. Besides, relationships between spouses should be relegated to off-limits territory.

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Of course, when you seek the highest office in the country — and have your own reality TV show — you do knowingly cede a certain amount of privacy. You open your life up to a heavy dose of scrutiny and public speculation on relations between family members. But it’s reasonable for members of the first family to want to set boundaries, and it's odd that we remain so fixated on the inner workings of a marriage that doesn’t really affect the American people too heavily.

The news media's treatment of the first lady has been harsh, despite the intensely apolitical role she has assumed. Maybe, just maybe, Mrs. Trump isn't enlivened by politics and wishes to take on a more passive and domestic role. It’s her prerogative to do so, and it's not up to us to corner her into sharing personal information or otherwise cajole her into the spotlight.

Maybe we're bad feminists

After all, mosts feminists would agree that women should not be coerced or pressured. Doesn’t our routine public examination of the first lady's inner thoughts sometimes fall into that territory? Perhaps many of us are bad feminists, interested in advocating dignity and respect for women we like, but forgetting to extend that same grace to women who are married to public figures whose beliefs we find objectionable.

These comments by Daniels come on the coattails of scurrilous claims by former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who said in her recently released memoir that Melania cannot wait for Trump to leave office so she can divorce him.

Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, says Omarosa and Melania "rarely, if ever, interacted," implying that the former would have no way of knowing intimate details about the Trumps' marital discord (or lack thereof).

How disappointed would our Constitution’s Framers be if they saw what American politics has become — White House aides and their hackneyed, tell-all memoirs, slinging doltish rumors for the press to latch onto, letting the personal leech into the political.

It’s silly for us to pretend we’re entitled to comments from Melania on her personal life. Daniels, of all people, gets this. Why don’t the rest of us?

Liz Wolfe is an editor and writer based in Austin, Texas. You can follow her on Twitter: @lizzywol.