Donald Trump once praised a middle school classmate of daughter Ivanka’s for having a “great figure” and compared another classmate to a “young Cindy Crawford,” a former friend of the president’s daughter claims.
Lysandra Ohrstrom, who was a close friend of Ivanka Trump from their time in middle school up until adulthood when she was a maid of honor at her wedding to Jared Kushner, spoke out about their relationship in a scathing essay for Vanity Fair . As Indy 100 noted, the essay was filled with a number of damaging revelations about Ivanka Trump but also took some digs at her father.
The former pal said they attended an elite Manhattan all-girls school together, and the two became friends shortly after she was invited to attend Ivanka Trump’s 13th birthday party at her father’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. The two grew closer from there, and Ohrstrom said she was able to spend time inside their penthouse with the real estate mogul who would later become president.
As she explained, Donald Trump would sometimes make inappropriate comments about the looks of his daughter’s young friends.
“He would barely acknowledge me except to ask if Ivanka was the prettiest or the most popular girl in our grade,” the former friend wrote.
“Before I learned that the Trumps have no sense of humor about themselves, I remember answering honestly that she was probably in the top five. ‘Who’s prettier than Ivanka?’ I recall him asking once with genuine confusion, before correctly naming the two girls I’d had in mind. He described one as a young Cindy Crawford, while the other he said had a great figure.”
She went on to claim that Donald Trump had a difficult time remembering her name but “seemed to have a photographic memory for changes in my body.” She recalled an incident when they were eating together at his Mar-a-Lago resort and Donald Trump Jr. stole half of a grilled cheese sandwich from her plate. His younger sister scolded him, but her dad responded with an apparent dig at her weight instead.
“Don’t worry. She doesn’t need it. He’s doing her a favour,” she recalled him saying, adding that he would sometimes congratulate her if it appeared she lost weight.
Ohrstrom went on to write that she and Ivanka Trump drifted apart, and she grew dismayed at how she took a position as a top White House adviser but failed to push back against her father’s more controversial decisions. That was a frequent criticism from many of the president’s opponents, who noted that the first daughter portrayed herself as a moderate and more reasonable voice but failed to speak up against things like the policy to separate migrant children from their parents and place them in detention centers.