Donald Trump talks with his former wife Ivana Trump during the men's final at the US Open. Mike Blake/Reuters Ivana Trump, President Donald Trump's first wife and the mother of his three eldest children, said she approached then-first lady Hillary Clinton after a speech in 1992 to ask her why she put up with her husband's cheating.

"I went up to her and asked, 'How do you deal with it?' She knew I was talking about the cheating," Ivana wrote in her new memoir, "Raising Trump." "She just looked at me and walked away."

Former president Bill Clinton had been dogged by rumors of affairs and allegations of sexual misconduct for years. And in 1998, his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, became public and threatened his presidency.

"I've often wondered what course her life would have taken if she'd left Bill after the Monica Lewinsky scandal," Ivana added of Hillary.

Ivana, who divorced Donald Trump in the early 1990s following his affair with Marla Maples, said she doesn't understand why people stay with spouses who cheat.

"I look at political wives who stand by their cheating, lying husbands at press conferences with a glazed look in their eyes, and I can't believe they put up with it," she wrote. "How do they explain it to their children?"

Ivana called her own public divorce a "living nightmare" and "excruciating," in part because of the media and public scrutiny of her husband's affair and the drawn out divorce.