First lady’s rep blasts ‘false’ reports about Melania Trump

FILE: Melania Trump (Photo by Marc Nozell/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

WASHINGTON — First lady Melania Trump’s office is fed up with speculation about marital strife in the White House.

Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, took to Twitter Friday to blast “flat-out false reporting” about the first lady that has emerged in recent days.

“BREAKING,” she wrote. “The laundry list of salacious & flat-out false reporting about Mrs. Trump by tabloid publications & TV shows has seeped into ‘main stream media’ reporting.”

Grisham added that Mrs. Trump is focused on her family and role as first lady, “not the unrealistic scenarios being peddled daily by the fake news.”

The tabloid Daily Mail reported Friday that Mrs. Trump has spent a number of nights at a D.C. hotel in the wake of reports of allegations by adult film star Stormy Daniels that she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, shortly after he married Melania.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s personal lawyer brokered a $130,000 payment to Daniels in October 2016 to prohibit her from publicly discussing the alleged affair before the election. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has scheduled an appearance on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” following the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday.

Mrs. Trump had originally been scheduled to join her husband at an economic summit in Davos, Switzerland, this week. But her office said Tuesday, the day before Trump’s departure, that Mrs. Trump would not be going, citing unspecified scheduling and logistical issues.

On Thursday, the first lady paid a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

She has joined her husband on his other foreign trips.