Sunday, June 21, 2026

Melania Trump MIA from Xmas Photo Because Mother is Very Ill: I Told You This in 2018, After Ivana Trump Told Me

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EXCLUSIVE Melania Trump is getting all kinds of grief for not appearing with Donald in their Christmas photo.

Personally, I don’t care, and no one blames her for keeping her distance from a man who tells his enemies to ‘rot in hell’ on Christmas Day.

But Melania, I can tell you, was with her mother and that’s why she’s not in the picture.

I first told you about Melania’s mother being sick back in 2018. Now I can tell you who told me, because she’s gone: Ivana Trump.

The late Ivana, now buried in an unmarked, overgrown grave at Donald’s Bedminster, New Jersey Golf Club, told me that Amalija Knauss had cancer, was very ill then, and that Melania was spending most of her time with her in Bedminster.

Ivana told me that Knauss’s basically lived there in their own house on the golf course, Melania and Barron, in 2018, lived there, too.

Before Trump was erroneously elected president in 2016, Barron spent most of his time with his grandparents on a separate floor of Trump Tower.

If you look at the full Christmas photo taken at Mar-a-Lago, off to the left is Melania’s father. He’s smiling, too. But I’m sure he’s not happy that his wife and daughter are not present.

As much as everyone hates the Trumps, and likes to make fun of Melania, why would she be absent if her father was there? And why would he be alone?

As for Ivana she told me all this privately at a dinner party, but “off the record.” It was just a conversation we had, and I left her name out of it in 2018 so as to not to cause her grief with that lousy family. But now that she’s gone, and they’ve disrespected her memory so shamefully, I felt it was okay to explain the whole situation.

Let’s hope Melania’s mother is on the mend and will make a full recovery.

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Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman is the founder and editor-in-chief of Showbiz411. He wrote the FOX411 column on FoxNews.com from 1999 to 2009, where he covered Michael Jackson, and previously wrote the "Intelligencer" column at New York magazine in the mid-1990s, where he covered the O.J. Simpson trial. He also edited Fame magazine. His bylines have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Vogue, Details, and the Miami Herald. He is a voting member of the Critics Choice Awards (Film and Television branches), and his movie reviews are tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. With D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he co-produced the 2002 documentary "Only the Strong Survive," which screened at Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

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