Rumors of Vanity Fair‘s Melania Trump feature came true with their latest issue’s Inside the Trump Marriage: Melania’s Burden. No out-and-out bombshells about the former model’s life but lots of it is VERY eye-opening, starting with how she came to town.

“In 1996 she moved to New York City, settling into Zeckendorf Towers, on Union Square, where Zampolli set her up with a roommate, a photographer named Matthew Atanian. Unlike many twentysomethings, who come to New York City with an unquenchable lust for experience, Melania, according to Atanian, had little interest in nightlife or making friends. When she went out, it seemed to be with older men, only for dinner, and she always came home before her roommate had gone out, he says. Demonstrating admirable Slavic discipline, “she wore ankle weights around the apartment and the common areas,” recalls Atanian. “She would strictly eat five to seven vegetables and fruits every day. She drank a lot of water . . . . She was looking to make money [as a model].”

But, according to Atanian, Melania was getting only second- and third-tier modeling work, and, at age 26, time was running out.”

And then a chance meeting changed everything…

“Melania captured the attention of Donald Trump at a party, thrown by Zampolli, at the Times Square nightclub the Kit Kat Club, during Fashion Week in September 1998. Trump had come with a date, Norwegian cosmetics heiress Celina Midelfart, but when she went off to use the bathroom, Trump approached Melania and asked for her number. She took his number instead—a story she tells proudly. Soon they were at the 1990s Greenwich Village hot spot Moomba, starting a romance. Atanian and one of their model friends ribbed Melania, he says, coming out “with remarks such as ‘Oh, it’s the small hands you like, not the money, right? The comb-over, the dashing good looks.’ Melania would say, ‘Stop it, stop it.’ Her rap was ‘He’s a real man.’ “

Gross. They dated for 7 years before tying the knot in ’05. But then there was trouble in Mar-A-Lago-Land…

“About six months after they married, she became pregnant with Barron—and things changed, according to one source. She was 35—“checkout time” for women, as Trump once told Howard Stern-and no longer the dewy fox he’d met seven years earlier. A visitor to one of Trump’s homes, late into Melania’s pregnancy, recalls him remarking that he agreed to the baby on the condition that Melania would get her body back. ‘She promised him that everything would go back to the way it was,’ says this guest; it struck this person as a “contract.” And he was simply rude to her. ‘There was no ‘How do you feel?’ No opening of doors, making sure she didn’t fall. Just ‘You wanted to have a baby.’ ”

And then there was “Pussy Gate“…

“This was a five-alarm fire, and it seemed as though Melania, in spite of her previous missteps, was the only person who could put it out. On October 17, she went on CNN to defend her husband, dismissing his words as “boy talk” and blaming everyone else—Billy Bush, who had “egged him on,” NBC for releasing the tape, the “left-wing media” for reporting on it, and the accusers, whose accounts were “lies.” Trump’s defenders dug in. Zampolli, while acknowledging that the tape wasn’t pleasant to hear, waves it away. “Sometimes, [during] Girls Night Out, you guys make some comments about bodies like this.” Pignatelli agrees. “He adores women. And he respects women. When you adore your daughter, you respect women. And he adores Ivanka. Literally adores her. So when a man adores his daughter, he respects women.”

And so the frostiness set in after he was elected and Melania stays in New York City…

“New York’s chattering class has recently been abuzz with gossip that Melania was considering a divorce after the Access Hollywood tape came out. But Melania’s camp denies those rumors, and Zampolli says that during New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago “it looked like they were on a first date. I don’t have that kind of romance with my wife.” Us Weekly has reported that the Trumps sleep in separate quarters, both in New York and at Mar-a-Lago. Grisham dismisses this as “fictional.” In any case, Zampolli explains that, for people like him and Donald, that’s no big deal. “I built a very big house,” he says, gesturing at his massive town house, “that goes to six floors . . . . [My wife] wants to live in her own spot, trust me. The house is 20,000 square feet, as you can see.”

So, will she ever move to Washington? Donald seems to have picked the perfect silent partner.

“After two high-maintenance wives, Donald Trump seems deliberately to have chosen as his third a woman who would be both bombshell and cipher, a physical testament to his manhood and amazingness. She would be decorative and polite, not needy and annoying. “I’m not a nagging wife,” Melania has declared a couple of times—her manifesto. According to some of Trump’s friends and associates, she has stuck to it.”

Read the whole juicy story here. No doubt, to be continued. Nobody knows how any of this will end…

(via Vanity Fair)