The 2016 campaign has not been kind to Melania Trump, and this week is no exception.

In two new interviews, she was sent in to defend her husband’s alleged mistreatment of women despite not knowing him when most of the accusers did. And she did so in front of a media that has not treated her kindly, to say the least, throughout Donald Trump’s run for president.

Poised under pressure, Melania did as good a job as her husband could have hoped, and a better job than he has of staying on message. The trouble is, 11 days after the leak of the Access Hollywood recording, there isn’t much she can plausibly say to defend him. She wasn’t present for any of the alleged incidents. How can she possibly purport to know whether charges against her husband are true? Especially now that there’s video of Trump admitting every single one of the alleged behaviors, if not the specific incidents?

Accordingly, her excuses didn’t add up.



There was the attempt to explain away Trump’s boast about grabbing women by the genitals as “boy talk”. “I know how some men talk, and that’s how I saw it,” she said. It’s a funny way to feel about a man born just five years after your own father. Over the course of Melania’s interview, age would emerge as an even more salient point.

The year that Jessica Leeds claims Trump stuck his hand up her skirt uninvited while sitting beside her on a flight to New York was 1980. Leeds was 38 at the time the alleged incident occurred; Melania was 10 years old.

She was a teenager living in Slovenia in 1989, the year Trump’s first wife, Ivana, claimed, in a sworn divorce deposition from 1990, that he raped her; Melania was still a young woman years later, when Trump allegedly engaged in the sexual predation and “attempted rape” of his business associate Jill Harth.

Five years later, when Melania finally did move to New York and met her future husband at a party in the fall of 1998, Trump was a stranger to her by her own admission. “I didn’t know much about Donald Trump,” she told the writer Julia Ioffe. “I had my life, I had my world. I didn’t follow Donald Trump and what kind of life he had.”

So how could she really know “they’re lies”, as she described the charges to CNN?

Melania’s best claim to authority comes with regard to sexual assault allegations leveled by the former People writer Natasha Stoynoff, and even there, it’s a tenuous one. Melania wasn’t present in the room where the alleged assault occurred during a “tour” of Mar-a-Lago, but she was able to take issue with one of Stoynoff’s subsidiary claims – that she later ran into her much later on the street in New York – using that as evidence to discredit the entire story. “I would not recognize her,” she told CNN. We’re talking about the relatively rare case in which Melania has any relevant history to offer at all; and even here, People has pushed back, saying Stoynoff was with a friend who corroborates her story.

The meaninglessness of Melania’s denials isn’t lost on accusers like Harth, who in my interview with her back in July said it was the insistence of Ivanka Trump that her dad is “not a groper” that pushed her over the edge. After staying silent on the matter for almost 20 years – her initial lawsuit was filed in 1997 – she felt driven to defend her story and herself. “She was 10 years old at the time,” she told me of Ivanka. “She didn’t know what her father was about, what he was doing, how he was acting.” (In response to Melania’s insistence Monday night that the Trump described by accusers is “not the man I know”, Harth tweeted: “Dream on, Melania.”)



Mostly, though, Melania Trump’s appearances involved impugning the integrity of the accusers – and, of course, the media. “I believe my husband – it was all organized from the opposition,” she told CNN. “They can never check the background of these women. They don’t have any facts.” In doing so, she was merely borrowing a line from her husband’s playbook.

Blindly accusing the free press of a vast conspiracies isn’t a good look in a democratic society. But if anyone can be forgiven for such behavior, perhaps it should be her.

That she’s not running for president didn’t stop the New York Post from running nude photos of her on the cover; or the Daily Mail from questioning the legitimacy of her immigration status; or practically everyone in media from taking a good long laugh at her expense after parts of her RNC speech were found to be lifted from a Michelle Obama script. Never mind that it wasn’t her fault, that some inept speechwriter or campaign operative was almost certainly to blame. She was the one in the crosshairs.

While all that does not a pack of liars or a media conspiracy make, it does help explain why she would use her moment on center stage to lash out at reporters and the women who have accused her husband. It does not make her right, but it does make her sympathetic. As a Vanity Fair piece, The Quiet Tragedy of Melania Trump, concluded earlier this week: “It shouldn’t be seen as petty. It should be seen as profoundly sad.”

Melania insisted on CNN that she didn’t want our pity, but in the next breath, unwittingly, she elicited it again. Asked what she’d do if her husband, a man whose Twitter account frequently functions as a textbook example of online trolling, ascends to the presidency, she said, without irony, that she’d work to end cyberbullying: “The social media, it’s very damaging for the children.”

Maybe she’s making the brilliantly subtle suggestion she’d undo the model of political bullying her husband stands for. More likely, she’s revealed she lacks even the most rudimentary understanding of his faults.