How Much Money Did Donald Trump's First Wife Get In Their Divorce?
Donald Trump married for the first time right when his status as a self-made billionaire was beginning to earn him the popularity he would become drunk on a decade later. And Ivana Trump helped paved the way alongside him. After meeting the Czech model at an Upper East Side bar in 1976, Donald made her his Mrs. just a year later, as Town & Country pointed out. Ivana quickly proved to be a skilled businesswoman and was soon helping run The Trump Organization, the report detailed. According to a 1988 Vanity Fair profile, Ivana rose to CEO of the lucrative Atlantic City casino Trump's Castle, which profited $35 million in 1987 — that's after-tax.
Ivana was a big part of the Trump brand in the 1980s, the decade that transformed Donald into the face of the American Dream. But their marriage began to crumble in 1990, an event that coincided with the beginning of difficult years — both personally and financially — for The Donald. The previous winter, news broke that Donald had been having an affair with model Marla Maples, which became a media sensation, as Vanity Fair noted in 1990. By then, Maples was already living in Donald's yacht, meaning she was firmly in his life.
That fact was important because it could alter the conditions of the prenuptial agreement Ivana and Donald signed in 1987. Read on to learn what happened and just how much Ivana ended up getting following her high-profile divorce from former President Donald Trump.
Ivana Trump, despite being the wife of a billionaire, ended up with $14 million
As the New York Daily News reported, Ivana Trump claimed that her husband's fortune had been undervalued in December 1987, when they last amended the agreement. So, when the details of Donald Trump's affair with Marla Maples came to light in 1990, Ivana sought to nullify the prenuptial agreement she had signed upon marrying the real estate heir, The New York Times. As legal docs tend to be, prenups are hard to fight, but she had a few reasons to try. First off, if she could prove that Maples was already in Donald's life before 1987, she would have a legal reason to contest it, as Vanity Fair explained in 1990.
Secondly, Donald was already on the brink of financial collapse by that time, and she would wind up being one of his creditors if he were to file for personal bankruptcy, according to The New York Times. Ivana also said Donald, without her knowledge, added a clause stating she should return any gifts she had received from her ex-husband during their time together. She got that one removed, per the New York Daily News.
But fighting all the other clauses proved trickier. "The prenuptial agreement is airtight," Donald told People then. And Donald was right. In the end, Ivana ended up with exactly what was on the prenup: $14 million plus an annual $650,000 in child support and some property, according to The New York Times.
Donald Trump married Marla Maples — but it didn't last
Following his public divorce from Ivana Trump, Donald Trump continued to fuel a casual relationship with Marla Maples. That changed in 1993, when Maples got pregnant with Tiffany Trump, according to People. "She came a little sooner than I had anticipated," Maples told the magazine in 2016. Tiffany was born in October of that year, and two months after, Maples became Trump's second wife, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The union wouldn't last. By mid-1997, Trump and Maples were separated. Trump filed for divorce shortly after, but the process took more than two years to be finalized because Maples, like Ivana Trump had done before her, fought Trump over their prenuptial agreement, the report detailed. Maples said at the time that the document had been drafted just five days before her wedding and that she hadn't read it before signing it, trusting Trump's "verbal commitments" that she would get more if they were to divorce, per the AP.
Like Ivana, Maples's attempts to change the specifics of the agreements were unsuccessful, and she walked away with just $2 million when the divorce was finalized in 1999. "After giving Donald two years to honor the verbal commitments he made to me during our 12-year relationship, I decided to walk away completely under the terms of the prenuptial agreement that had been placed before me just five days before our 1993 wedding," Maples said, per the AP.