When a 9-Year-Old Ivanka Trump Faced Disturbing Questions About Her Father’s Intimate Life

At just nine years old, Ivanka Trump endured an invasive and inappropriate encounter with reporters—a harrowing moment emblematic of her tumultuous childhood in the public eye. As she navigated her parents’ highly publicized divorce, media scrutiny reached an appalling low when journalists outside her private school asked her a shocking question: whether her father, Donald Trump, was good in bed. This disturbing incident arose from Marla Maples’ infamous tabloid claim that Donald had given her "the best sex I ever had." Writer Nina Burleigh wrote, “The third grader had no place to hide."

As per People magazine, reporters waited outside the doors of [Ivanka’s] private school, The Chapin School, snapping pictures and hollering questions, including whether Marla Maples’s claim about Donald’s bedroom skills was true. According to Ivanka, the trauma was compounded by the public nature of the divorce, as headlines about her father’s affair with Maples and its fallout became impossible to avoid. Reflecting on her childhood in her 2010 book The Trump Card, Ivanka described how the scandal permeated her daily life. She recalled, “One day the headline was ‘THEY MET IN CHURCH!' The next time it was ‘SEPARATE BEDS!’ The worst was a New York Post cover photo of Marla Maples, a woman I’d never met, who was being talked about as my father’s new girlfriend…Can you imagine?”

Unable to cope with the scrutiny, Ivanka broke down at school, nudging administrators to send her home. According to Burleigh Ivanka exclaimed, “What type of person would ask a nine-year-old girl that kind of question? About her own father, no less?” Her mother, Ivana Trump, later wrote in her memoir Raising Trump about the deep scars the divorce left on her children, accusing Maples of originating their pain. This early episode was not the last time Ivanka would find herself the subject of uncomfortable attention related to her father.

Over the years, Donald’s remarks about his daughter have ignited widespread unease. When Ivanka hosted the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant at age 16, Trump reportedly asked then-Miss Universe Brook Antoinette Mahealani Lee, “Don’t you think my daughter’s hot?” His comments were not one-off lapses in judgment but part of a repeated pattern. As per The Independent, during interviews on The Howard Stern Show, Trump praised Ivanka’s appearance, calling her “voluptuous” and agreeing when Stern referred to her as “a piece of ass.” Trump boasted, “You know who’s one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her. Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She’s 6 feet tall, she’s got the best body. She made a lot of money as a model—a tremendous amount.”

On The View in 2006, Trump commented that if Ivanka weren’t his daughter, “perhaps I’d be dating her.” Even as recently as 2015, during a Rolling Stone interview, he quipped, “After I met Ivanka and praised her to her father, he said, ‘Yeah, she's something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren't happily married and, ya know, her father . . .’” Such remarks, compounded by years of public scrutiny, have painted a complicated portrait of the relationship between Donald and Ivanka.