Ivana Trump's reveals she always feared the socialite would trip down her stairs

Tragic new details are emerging in the death of Ivana Trump, who was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse on Thursday after suffering an apparent fatal fall down her opulent winding staircase. 

The death of Donald Trump’s first wife, the mother of his eldest children, at age 73 sent shockwaves through the family, with son Eric Trump saying as he left Ivana’s townhouse that it was ‘a very sad day, a very sad day.’ 

Ivana had grown increasingly frail during more than two years of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, friends say, and the socialite’s close confidante Nikki Haskell says she had feared an accident on the stairs. 

‘I have to tell you something — that has always been my fear. She had one of those really beautiful staircases that was impossible to walk down,’ Haskell told Extra on Friday.

‘Narrow in the inside and wider as it got out. I was always afraid that she would fall. I don’t know what happened, but it’s not hard for me to believe that’s what happened — treacherous stairs,’ added Haskell.

New York’s medical examiner earlier reported that Ivana died of injuries suffered in an accidental fall, and police sources say that she was discovered near the bottom of a staircase in her Upper East Side home.

Meanwhile, photos have emerged showing parts of the seven-story home’s winding staircase, which is covered in thick carpeting.

In a tragic twist of fate, Ivana was preparing to leave for a St. Tropez getaway on Friday — her first trip since the pandemic descended in March 2020.

‘The past couple of years, she became very reclusive… She had a big townhouse and she was really afraid of getting the virus, much more so than anybody I know,’ said Haskell. 

‘She didn’t want to go anywhere, she didn’t want to travel… She took it very, very seriously. She was afraid of getting sick.’ 

On her walks and salon visits on the Upper East Side, Ivana was often seen being assisted by a home health aide in recent months.

She was last seen alive on Wednesday evening, when she ventured out to her favorite neighborhood restaurant, just a few doors down from her home.

Around 6pm, Trump and her health aide stopped in Alesti on East 64th Street, where the socialite ordered soup to be delivered to her home, the New York Post reported. 

‘She did not come in,’ restaurant owner Paolo Alavian told the outlet. ‘I bumped into her outside. I said, ‘Señora, how are you? Good?’ She said, ‘I just went for my walk,’ and we chat couple of minutes as a common thing we always [do].’

Alavian said Trump’s demeanor was ‘very, very normal,’ but that she appeared tired. 

He said that she always ordered soup to go, and that carrot soup was her favorite.

Several friends noticed that Ivana had difficulty walking recently, and said that isolation during the pandemic appeared to have taken a heavy toll.

‘She aged very rapidly the last one year,’ restaurateur Thomas Makkos, the owner of Nello, told the Post, adding that when he last saw Ivana a few months ago, ‘She seemed a little down, she seemed frail.’

‘She had difficulty walking. We had to help her home,’ he said.

Atilla Cetin, a manager at Nello, an Italian which sits a block from Ivana’s house, says she appeared in good health during her most recent visit three weeks ago.

Cetin told DailyMail.com Ivana looked ‘terrific’ and ‘appeared in good spirits’ the last time he’d seen her, and blinked back tears as he expressed regret at not visiting her before her sudden death. 

Ivana was very popular with local businesses, and had been due to have her hair styled at 2pm on the day of her death. Staff there said she appeared in decent health, and was looking forward to an upcoming trip to St Tropez. 

Fatih Cakirca, the brother of salon owner Salih Cakirca, told DailyMail.com on Thursday that his brother had done Ivana’s hair for 20 years, and that she came in once a week to get the ‘Ivana Classic’.

‘I’ve also known her for 20 years. She was a very nice lady, we’re shocked and sad. She had an appointment today at 2pm and the housekeeper just cancelled,’ he said.

‘I know she was going to St Tropez until September. I just saw her last Friday, she came to the salon, I did her hair. She was great, nothing wrong with her. She looked very healthy and happy. She was a very lovely lady …. Very friendly,’ added Fatih Cakirca, who works alongside his brother at Salih Salon, not far from Ivana’s home.

The New York City medical examiner’s office said Friday that Ivana died accidentally from blunt impact injuries to her torso in an apparent fall.

Police had been looking into whether she fell down the stairs after finding her unresponsive at the foot of a staircase, but the medical examiner’s brief report did not specify when the accident took place.

Earlier on Friday, Eric Trump praised his mother as an ‘extraordinary woman’ who could ski faster than ‘any man down a mountain and still look like a supermodel’. 

Eric, 38, told Fox Digital on Friday that he was working in nearby Trump Tower on Thursday and was able to arrive at his mother’s apartment within minutes of being called. 

A visibly devastated Eric was pictured leaving his mother’s home on Thursday afternoon around 4.30pm alongside his wife, Lara, who called her death a ‘big loss’. 

His wife Lara told Fox News that Ivana was ‘an ‘incredible woman’ and that ‘New York City will never be the same without Ivana Trump.’

‘Not only was she known throughout her neighborhood but she was known throughout the city, she was an incredible socialite,’ she said. 

She continued by saying ‘obviously a tough day for all of us in the family yesterday,’ but ‘we’ll all get through this’ and said you should ‘come together as a family’ when faced with situations like this. 

Lara then spoke about Ivana’s life and said she was only able to escape communist Czechoslovakia because she was a ‘world class skier.’

This led her loving her life in America, and Lara said ‘no one that cherished this country more than she did, she truly appreciated America because she understood how lucky we were to be here.’

On meeting Donald Trump, who she’d eventually marry and have three kids with, Lara said they were ‘not only partners in life, but partners in business.’

Lara called Ivana an ‘incredible business woman,’ and said ‘she is credited with restoring glory to places like the Plaza Hotel’ and she ‘managed the casinos and hotels in Atlantic City.’ 

Ivana Trump is survived by her mother, her three children and 10 grandchildren.

Ivana’s mother, Marie Zelníčková, is 95 and due to turn 96 in September; she was last seen with her daughter in 2019, when the family gathered to mark the matriarch’s 93rd birthday.

On Friday, Ivanka Trump posted a tribute to her mother on Instagram, sharing several family photos from throughout the years.

‘Heartbroken by the passing of my mother. Mom was brilliant, charming, passionate and wickedly funny. She modeled strength, tenacity and determination in her every action,’ wrote Ivanka.

‘She lived life to the fullest — never forgoing an opportunity to laugh and dance,’ she added. ‘I will miss her forever and will keep her memory alive in our hearts always.’

Eric also took to Instagram to post a tribute to his late mother, sharing several images of the socialite and her children over the years, including photos of Ivana with her children when they were younger.

Ivana was last pictured out and about in New York City on June 22, when she was seen leaving her Upper East Side townhouse and being escorted to a hair salon.

Images showed the socialite being assisted by an aide, who gave her arm to Ivana as they strolled down the sidewalk to her hair appointment.

The day raging Ivana chased cheating Trump down the ski slope – going backwards so she could wag her finger in his face: Just one gloriously feisty cameo in the life of the irrepressible society queen, who has died aged 73  

By Tom Leonard for the Daily Mail

There was just one thing that would have made the brash and chaotic circus of the Trump presidency complete — his irrepressible first wife, Ivana. Unlike shy and glacial Melania, whose heart never seemed to be in it, the Czech-born former skiing instructor and fur coat model would have been the perfect, larger-than-life First Lady for the bombastic president.

Her outrageous hairdos were as bouffant as his, her wit as caustic and her personality just as egocentric and competitive. The formidable Ivana was also a detail-obsessed workaholic who played a key role in the Trump business empire.

She became an unlikely hit with British viewers in the 2010 series of Celebrity Big Brother and would surely have relished every second in the White House — although heaven only knows what the queen of kitsch would have done with the decor.

Instead, Ivana had to observe some sense of decorum and watch from the sidelines — and largely succeeded.

Although she diplomatically stayed silent about ‘The Donald’ (as she memorably dubbed him) during his election campaign, a woman who’d traded off her husband’s name for years could hardly keep quiet when she had a memoir to plug in 2017.

‘I have the direct number to White House,’ she boasted on U.S. breakfast TV with her distinctive Eastern European diction, adding that — 25 years after they divorced — she still talked to The Donald every two weeks.

‘But I don’t really want to call him because Melania is there and I don’t really want to cause any kind of jealousy or something like that because I’m basically first Trump wife. I’m First Lady, OK?’

Of course, it was designed to get a rise and it worked. Within hours, Melania had broken her usual silence and issued a statement defending herself, adding icily: ‘There is clearly no substance to this statement from an ex. Unfortunately only attention-seeking and self-serving noise.’

A rebuke like that was hardly going to quell a force of nature like Ivana, a woman who, on discovering while they were skiing in Aspen that Mr Trump was cheating on her with future wife Marla Maples, had it out with Maples and then spotted her husband hastily putting on his skis to flee her wrath. She pursued the wobbly novice down the mountain, wagging her finger in his face as she skied backwards beside him and he tried to avoid falling over.

Ivana, who died on Thursday, aged 73, after falling downstairs at her Manhattan home, always seemed made of rather tougher stuff than the other women in The Donald’s life. Indeed, he reportedly resolved that after Ivana — who became head of interior design for the Trump Organisation and managed a clutch of its biggest developments — he’d never again marry a woman who competed with him in the boardroom and in the social pages.

During their 15-year marriage, which lasted from 1977 to 1992, they set new standards for glitzy excess as they came to epitomise the 1980s New York power couple — an image which Mr Trump exploited as he built the TV career that eventually took him to the White House.

Ivana shared his limitless ambition, boasting that ‘in 50 years, we will be the Rockefellers’.

Although she had a reputation for being less brash and more charming than him (which can’t have been hard), her candid revelations, even to casual acquaintances, about her sex life proved too much for those in New York society who would have preferred a little less information.

Like Melania, a child of Soviet-era Eastern Europe, she was born Ivana Zelnickova in a small town south of Prague in 1949. Her parents, an engineer and a telephone operator, encouraged her to become a competitive athlete. She was so good at skiing that she got into the Czech junior national team (although Mr Trump claimed she got into the Olympic squad) and was briefly married to an Austrian ski instructor.

That ‘Cold War marriage’, as she called it, got her the Austrian passport that allowed her to move to Canada, where she worked as a model and ski instructor.

She moved to New York in her early 20s and met the then 29-year-old Mr Trump when he helped get a table for herself and a friend in a restaurant he was managing for the family business. ‘He offered us a table,’ she recalled. ‘I told my girlfriend I had good news and bad news — the good news was we could get a table fast, the bad news was that Donald was going to sit with us.’ They married less than a year later.

As she later observed: ‘I came to America and I saw the houses, the cars, the bananas and the strawberries in winter, and I knew what I wanted. With Donald, I found them, yes? I may be blonde, but I was not stupid.’

She gave Mr Trump three children — Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric — later claiming that when she gave birth to their first child, she said she wanted to name him Donald Jr. ‘But what if he’s a loser?’ said Mr Trump, apparently genuinely worried.

She also wanted to be part of his business life and, at least in private, became an equal partner. The gaudy opulence for which Mr Trump became notorious was her inspiration. Ivana took credit for supervising the construction and design of Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York, and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City.

She was paid a salary of nearly £1 million a year, plus all the couture frocks she could wear. She drenched the couple’s huge, triplex penthouse in Trump Tower in gold, brass and pink marble, and the couple flew around in their own Boeing 727. By the end of the 1980s, they were estimated to be worth $3billion.

However, according to Mr Trump’s niece Mary, the couple were so lazy and mean they would recycle presents for family members. Linda, Mary’s mother, once received a handbag from Ivana that contained a used Kleenex tissue, while Mary said she was once given a gift bag of food that had already been partially eaten.

Although Ivana insisted she and Mr Trump were kindred spirits —their daughter Ivanka described their shared approach to life as ‘all out, all the time’ — Ivana claimed she represented too much of a challenge to him.

‘Behind every successful woman, there is a man in shock,’ she wrote years later. ‘I was too successful to be Mrs Trump. In our marriage, there couldn’t be two stars. So one of us had to go.’

She insisted she had already heard rumours of her husband’s infidelity when, in the winter of 1989, a blonde woman approached her as she queued for lunch with her children in the super-smart ski resort of Aspen, Colorado, and introduced herself by saying: ‘I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?’

Ivana said she shot back: ‘Get lost. I love my husband.’

Witnesses said Ivana was rather more pointed than that, following Maples, a former beauty queen 15 years her junior, outside and telling her: ‘You bitch. Leave my husband alone.’

It was then that she spotted Trump trying to make a hasty getaway and memorably — for those watching — chased him down the slopes.

The messy and acrimonious, two-year divorce battle that followed cemented Ivana’s celebrity but also saw her claim in a sworn deposition that he’d once raped her after becoming enraged over painful scalp-reduction surgery he’d had in an attempt to deal with his hair loss.

Mr Trump denied the rape allegation and, after receiving a hefty financial settlement, Ivana later retracted her claims and clarified that it was not rape in ‘a literal or criminal sense’.

According to Ivana, Mr Trump once sent a bodyguard to collect young Donald Jr, then rang Ivana to say she wouldn’t see her son again as he would bring him up instead. It was a tactic, she observed, ‘simply to upset me’.

The warring parties also slugged it out in the Press. Miss Maples famously claimed Mr Trump had provided ‘the best sex I’ve ever had’. Ivana returned fire by telling newspapers her children would cry themselves to sleep, terrified they would never see her again.

She came away from the divorce with $14million, a mansion in Connecticut, an apartment at Trump Plaza on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the right to stay for a month a year at Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. Ivana also won sole custody of the children.

Not that either of them bore a grudge for long: within three years, they’d appeared together in a Pizza Hut commercial in which they even joked about their divorce battle. ‘Can I have the last slice?’ she asked. ‘Actually, you’re only entitled to half,’ he countered.

She showed she’d become the patron saint of divorcees in the 1996 film The First Wives Club, in which she had a cameo role, reassuring a group of divorced women: ‘Don’t get mad, get everything!’

Not one to simply sit back and enjoy her fortune, Ivana pioneered the sort of celebrity product lines that are now ubiquitous. She developed her own brands of clothing, jewellery and beauty products, which she’d plug herself on the TV shopping channels.

She became a motivational speaker and newspaper agony aunt, wrote four books and launched a magazine, Ivana’s Living In Style.

That ‘style’ remained very much her own. Joan Collins visited Ivana’s post-divorce New York home and commented: ‘I’ve rarely seen anything so badly decorated in faux everything in my life. Velvet on the walls! And cornices painted glittering gold!’

Ivana reportedly spent an annual £200,000 on her wardrobe and also kept four homes in the U.S. and Europe, and a yacht in the Mediterranean.

Ivana married Italian businessman Riccardo Mazzucchelli in 1995. But, despite reports he showered her with jewels, they separated 20 months later. She sued him for violating the confidentiality clause in their pre-nuptial agreement — while he sued her and Mr Trump for suggesting he was a gold-digger. The latter suit was settled in a British libel court for undisclosed terms.

After a six-year relationship with Italian aristocrat Count Roffredo Gaetani, a playboy Ferrari dealer, she married for a fourth time in 2008 — solidifying her ‘cougar’ reputation as Italian actor and model Rossano Rubicondi was 36 and she was 59. Mr Trump let them use Mar-a-Lago for the wedding, but within five months Ivana had asked for a separation after discovering he had a girlfriend.

Ivana and Rubicondi danced together in Italy’s Dancing With The Stars and although they divorced within a year, their on-off relationship continued until 2019.

In later life, Ivana divided her time between homes in New York, Miami and St Tropez, saying she turned down Mr Trump’s offer of the U.S. ambassadorship to the Czech Republic because she couldn’t face four years in Prague.

However, the once gregarious socialite shut herself away during the pandemic in terror of getting infected. A close friend said she had also been ‘devastated’ by the death of Rubicondi last October.

Her daughter Ivanka described her as ‘brilliant, charming, passionate and wickedly funny’, adding: ‘She lived life to the fullest — never forgoing an opportunity to laugh and dance.’

The Trump ‘brand’ certainly now glows with a little less of its brassy lustre.

‘It was an honor to know her and love her’: Donald Trump Jr. and his fiancée Kimberly Giulfoyle post Instagram tribute to his mum Ivana Trump and collage of photos

By Natasha Anderson For DailyMail.Com

Ivana Trump’s eldest son praised his mother for raising her children with ‘incredible values’ and challenging them to push themselves.

Donald Trump Jr. paid tribute to his late mother on Instagram Friday night, one day after her death, saying: ‘I am who I am today because of you.’

His fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, declared Ivana the ’embodiment of the American Dream,’ applauding her for her professional successes and being a ‘devoted and loving mother’ to her three children – Donald Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump. 

Throughout her life Ivana, the first wife of President Donald Trump, relished in her role as a loving mother and proudly described how she raised her children without their father’s help. 

Ivana, 73, was found ‘unconscious and unresponsive’ at the bottom of the staircase in her New York City townhouse on Thursday afternoon. She died from blunt impact injuries sustained during her fall and her death has been ruled an accident. 

Donald Jr., the eldest Trump child, said their family will miss Ivana ‘incredibly’ after her unexpected passing.

In a heartfelt Instagram post featuring photos of his mother, the businessman attributed his successes to the way Ivana raised him and his younger siblings.

‘Thanks for always pushing us hard, not letting us get away with anything, and instilling so many incredible values and personality traits,’ he lovingly penned.

‘From your sense of humor to your sense of adventure, I am who I am today because of you. I love you very much. R.I.P.’

Guilfoyle also honored her boyfriend’s mother Friday night.

‘Ivana Trump was a successful businesswoman, a remarkable athlete, & most notably, a devoted & loving mother to @DonaldJTrumpJr, @IvankaTrump, & @EricTrump,’ she wrote.

‘She was the embodiment of the American Dream. It was an honor to know her & to love her. We will all miss her so much.’

Guilfoyle and Donald Jr. have been dating since 2018 and got engaged on New Year’s Eve 2020. DailyMail.com broke the news of their engagement in January after insiders confirmed the couple had kept it under wraps for over a year.

The pair had been friends for over 15 years and the Trump family is reportedly a ‘big fan’ of Guilfoyle. She was also named the National Finance Chair of the Trump Victory Finance Committee in 2020.

A heartbroken Ivanka posted a moving tribute to her ‘brilliant, charming, passionate and wickedly funny’ mother Ivana on Thursday.

The 40-year-old said Ivana ‘modeled strength, tenacity and determination in her every action’ and had ‘lived life to the fullest’.

She also shared stunning pictures of the pair and the rest of their family from when they were growing up, including of her when she was young kissing her mom on a golden bed.

Son Eric also shared a heartwarming tribute with Dailymail.com – penned by himself, Ivanka and Don Jr – which remembered Ivana as an ‘incredible woman’ who was ‘a force in business, a world-class athlete, a radiant beauty, and caring mother and friend’.

The joint statement recalled the businesswoman’s tough upbringing behind the Iron Curtain and incredible journey to the US, having fled communism in Czechoslovakia before moving to Canada and then New York City.

They said she ‘taught her children about grit and toughness, compassion and determination’ and said she will be ‘dearly missed’.