Ivana Trump, the first wife
of Donald Trump and the mother of his three oldest children, died
from blunt force injuries to her torso that she suffered after an accidental
fall, New York City’s chief medical examiner said Friday.
The former president announced
that Ivana Trump died aged 73 a day earlier at her Manhattan home but
didn’t include any details about the cause or manner of her death. On Friday, a
spokesperson for the New York City office of the chief medical examiner confirmed
reports that Ivana Trump apparently fell inadvertently and was found at the
bottom of her home’s stairs.
US health
officials consider falls to be the leading cause of injury-related death
for people who are 65 years of age or older. About 64 out of 100,000 elderly
people die as a result of accidental falls, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Ivana Trump was born in Zlin –
now the Czech Republic – in 1949. She was a skier, ski instructor and model
before marrying Donald Trump in 1977, when he was a real estate
tycoon.
She partnered with Trump in
managing casinos and hotels while helping him become a Manhattan and global
socialite throughout the 1980s. She was also the mother to his children Donald
Jr, Ivanka and Eric.
The pair divorced in 1992,
with Donald Trump’s infidelity precipitating their split. He later married and
divorced Marla Maples, with whom he had daughter Tiffany, and is now with his
third wife, Melania Knauss Trump, the mother of his son Barron and the first
lady during his presidency from 2017 to 2021.
Ivana Trump had said she
supported her ex-husband’s run for the White House but said she wanted “this
whole thing to be over with” after he lost to Joe Biden and
desperately sought to overturn the result, including by telling his supporters
to “fight like hell” shortly before hundreds of them mounted a deadly attack on
the Capitol.
She said she believed her
children “enjoyed being around Donald and running the election and seeing what
will happen” but she wanted them to one day “be able to live their normal
lives”.
On Thursday afternoon,
emergency responders investigating a call from Ivana Trump’s home on
Manhattan’s Upper East Side found her unconscious. They pronounced her dead at
the scene and noted that there did “not appear to be any criminality”, police
said in a statement.
Trump, Donald Jr., and Ivanka
were supposed to be questioned Friday as part of a New York civil
investigation into their business dealings.
But the New York state
attorney general’s office postponed the depositions as a result of Ivana
Trump’s death. New dates for the depositions weren’t immediately set.
A statement from a state
attorney general’s spokesperson read: “We offer our condolences to the Trump
family.”
