The last time Ivanka Trump made a splash in New York, she and husband Jared Kushner‘s grinning faces were plastered over giant billboards in Times Square, alongside coronavirus death statistics and body bags.
It was late 2020 at the close of a Trump administration in which they had been key members and the solidly Democrat city she once called home wanted to make clear that she would never be welcome back.
What her best friend says about her
The New York Times dubbed the rich couple the Vuitton Vagabonds and Scarlett Johansson played her on New York‘s TV comedy, Saturday Night Live, in a spoof advert for a fragrance called Complicit.
Her best friend from school days gleefully told Vanity Fair: ‘I’ve watched as Ivanka has laid waste to the image she worked so hard to build.’
Ivanka ‘had the Trump radar for status, money and power, and her Dad’s instinct to throw others under the bus to save herself’, sneered Lysandra Ohrstrom.
Well, three years later, on Wednesday, 42-year-old Ivanka, was back in town and prompting some to wonder if the next person going under that bus might be her own father.
Donald’s $300million civil fraud trial
For the former fashion entrepreneur and senior White House aide was testifying in a Manhattan court at father Donald’s $300million civil fraud trial. And not for the defence but the prosecution.
It has to be said she wasn’t doing this by choice but, even so, it was a shocking development for the once inseparable father-daughter team.
The former president had been accustomed to showering his favourite child with praise, from drawing attention, in nauseating fashion, to her physical attractiveness — how perhaps he’d be ‘dating her’ if she weren’t his daughter — to lining her up as his dynastic successor, both in the family business and the White House.
Ivanka trying to walk out of her father’s shadow
However, his daughter today is doing her best to avoid any comparisons with Trump Senior as she tries to resume her former life as a socialite — someone who is snapped sashaying into glamorous parties, rather than slinking into acrimonious court battles with her father in the dock.
Still, as usual, she looked impossibly groomed and composed as she entered the Manhattan court building — in a $700 designer dark suit with white shirt, $775 Jimmy Choo shoes with a $3,400 Chanel bag — ignoring the shouts from bystanders of ‘crime family!’.
In a trial concerning allegations that the ex-president and others exaggerated his wealth to secure better loan deals, Ivanka was initially a defendant like her father, her brothers and the Trump Organisation itself.
But an appeals court dismissed the case against her on the grounds she’d left the business in January 2017 to work at the White House.
She tried to avoid having to testify but the court forced her. Sources say she had infuriated members of the Trump camp and hardly endeared herself to her father by hiring her own lawyer rather than rely on the legal team representing the family.
And in court, where she was on the stand for five hours, Ivanka adopted the opposite approach to her bombastic father, who the previous day furiously attacked New York’s attorney general who brought the case and the trial judge.
Operation Ivanka Rebrand
She spoke softly, chose her words carefully and often managed to smile — although her repeated replies of ‘I don’t recall’ to prosecution questions about working for the Trump Organisation only encouraged sceptics to conclude she was covering up for Dad.
Her court appearance aside, Operation Ivanka Rebrand appears to have been going well, driving home the message that she has moved on — from politics, the family business and her father’s toxic, election-denying circus — and is back where she belongs mixing with the rich, famous and glamorous.
Defying those who thought her reputation would never recover, she made a startling appearance in California last month at the 43rd birthday of reality TV superstar Kim Kardashian at a trendy Beverly Hills restaurant.
