This Mother’s Day, Ivanka Trump shared a tribute to her late mother Ivana, who died on July 14, 2022, at 73, after falling down a staircase at her Manhattan home. But the post did something the headlines rarely do: it pointed back at a woman who was more than a divorce story. Ivana Trump spent years being reduced to ‘Donald’s first wife’ — the one he left for Marla Maples, the one the New York Post made into a punchline. She was never just that.
The divorce that the tabloids turned into a spectacle — at her expense
Donald and Ivana Trump married in 1977 and spent the 1980s as New York’s most visible power couple. Then, around 1989, his affair with model Marla Maples became public. Maples would later give an interview confirming the relationship, and the New York Post ran the now-infamous quote — ‘It’s the best sex I’ve ever had’ — in a headline that made Ivana’s private betrayal into a city-wide joke. The divorce was finalized in 1992, with Ivana fighting for and receiving a substantial settlement after what was described as a prolonged legal battle Donald reportedly approached like a business negotiation.
What rarely gets said: Ivana didn’t disappear. She came out of that decade-long tabloid bonfire with her name intact — and rebuilt. She became a businesswoman, an author, and a socialite on her own terms, not as an extension of anyone else’s brand. The Marla Maples affair that ended the Trumps
Who Ivana Trump really was
Ivanka described her mother as ‘brilliant, charming, passionate, and wickedly funny.’ That’s a very different portrait from the woman the tabloids packaged as a wronged wife in a fur coat. Ivana raised three children — Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric — through the chaos of their parents’ split and the sustained public attention that came with having a father who would eventually run for president. By all accounts, she was the one who kept the family emotionally together during those years. Celebrity divorces that defined the '90s
She was also, by the time of her death, actively living her life. She was reportedly packing for a trip to St. Tropez when she fell. That detail — the suitcase, the plans, the momentum of a woman still going somewhere — is part of why her death hit so hard. The NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner ruled the manner of death accidental: blunt impact injuries to the torso from the fall. No foul play. Just the irreversible fragility of a body at the bottom of a staircase.
What Ivanka’s tribute says about grief, and what it doesn’t have to
Ivanka’s post doesn’t need to relitigate any of this. That’s not what a tribute on Mother’s Day is for. But the act of naming Ivana publicly — of calling her back into focus on a day built around maternal love — does something quiet and necessary. It says: she was a person first, a mother specifically, and a story that doesn’t end with her ex-husband’s name. Ivana Trump buried at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster
Ivana is buried at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in a private grassy section near the main clubhouse, marked by a granite stone. A rose-gold casket. A discreet grave at a golf course her ex-husband owns. The symbolism writes itself, but the woman inside it wrote her own story first — and that’s the part worth remembering today.
