Donald Trump‘s reaction to learning that then-girlfriend Marla Maples was pregnant was startling, according to biographer Michael Wolff. In the latest installment of his Substack series, The Epstein Diaries, Wolff recounts how Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was disrupted by Maples’ unexpected pregnancy in the early 1990s.
“He comes back to Epstein and says, ‘Hey, I think I’m kind of screwed here. She really is pregnant,’” Wolff recalled on the “Inside Trump’s Head,” podcast, which he co-hosts with Joanna Coles. “And so they go into a big debate about what can he do in that situation? How do you convince her to get an abortion?”
Wolff’s written account goes further. He writes that “the two friends debated pushing her down the stairs — this was Trump’s idea, Epstein more cautiously suggesting that his friend was, simply, screwed.” Wolff adds, “Marriage was, Epstein recognized, a key weakness of so many men of his acquaintance.”
“It’s sort of both tragic and comical to imagine these guys who have no sensitivity to this whatsoever, no idea actually of how you think about something like this,” Wolff said. “But at any rate, it actually results again, here, in some kind of old-fashioned notion of what you have to do. Of Trump getting married to Marla Maples and she has the child and then subsequently, of course, they get a divorce.”
The $10,000 baby food bet
When Maples revealed she was pregnant in 1993, Epstein reportedly doubted her claim and wagered a truckload of baby food that she was bluffing.
Years later, Epstein referenced the bet in a 2016 email exchange published among documents released by the House Oversight Committee. Writing to Deepak Chopra, he said, “Yes, in fact when she told donald she was pregnant…lost a 10k dollar bet with him and sent him a truck of baby food in payment.”
Epstein added that he had not spoken to Maples in years.
World Trump and Epstein inhabited
Wolff writes that Epstein, who never married, often mocked Trump for cultivating an image of “domestic respectability” even as the two men “devoted maximal energy to their social and sexual lives” in Manhattan.
According to Wolff, around 1993 and 1994, Maples was entering Trump’s life at the same time he and Epstein were allegedly involved with the same Norwegian model. “Whatever the arrangement is, back and forth — again, they are playing with someone and this is their shared, not only girlfriend, but kind of a shared joke,” Wolff told Coles.
Against that backdrop, news of Maples’ pregnancy landed unexpectedly.
Despite the discussion that followed, events unfolded in a conventional way. Tiffany Trump, Donald’s fourth of five children and his only child with Marla, was born on October 13, 1993. Two months later, on December 20, the couple married in a lavish ceremony at New York’s Plaza Hotel, with Jeffrey among the guests.
The marriage did not last. The couple separated in 1997 and divorced two years later. In 1998, Donald met Melania Knauss.