Next week, Melania will premiere at the “Donald J. Trump Kennedy Center” before being inflicted on the nation via Amazon streaming. I’m told tickets to this spectacle are expensive and hard to come by. DC’s Mar-a-Lago-faced lovelies and their MAGA dates will line up outside the renamed institution, reeking of duty-free cologne and teetering on the stilettos their queen trained herself to climb stairs in.

The history of this production begins with open-air graft, involves the (attempted) professional rehabilitation of a gross rape-accused toad known to women in Hollywood as a junior Harvey Weinstein, and ends with one of the greatest Emperor’s New Clothes events since the Republican Party first pretended the Big Lie was God’s truth.

When Jeff Bezos ponied up $40 million for a “documentary” about Melania at a dinner with the president-elect, entertainment industry insiders were already laughing. The most expensive documentaries barely cost $5 million; most are made for under a million. It was one of the first acts of utter obeisance by the one percent as the Trump family intake valve swung open.

The open-air graft was disgusting enough. But Melania’s choice of Brett Ratner is her “quiet piggy” to American women. And it is utterly on brand with the trademark “I don’t care, do you?” middle finger we’ve come to expect from the woman whose civic education stopped at East Bloc despotism.

Melania is Ratner’s first project since he was run out of Hollywood in the wake of sexual misconduct and rape accusations. I’m told Ratner, with Melania as “executive producer,” was hard-pressed to figure out what to do with all that money. He and his subject plotted out a 24-day shoot meant to provide an inside look at Melania’s “return” (known to be reluctant and short-lived) to the White House in 2025.

“He was saying he was going to shoot it like a feature film, with 40 cameras,” one insider laughed. “Forty cameras!” Rounding out the bizarre project’s team is Argentine millionaire Fernando Sulichin, a producer whose other documentary subjects include Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Putin and has worked with Oliver Stone and whom the Estonian secret service has accused of producing marketing for Russia.

The pussy-grabber’s First Lady is such a girlfriend to American women that she chose, to direct her film, a serial abuser whose picture is in the Epstein files shirtless and literally hugging the late sex trafficker Jean-Luc Brunel. Allegations from six women included forced blowjobs, masturbating in front of women and in one case, actual rape. He denied them all, but ran off to Israel after studios started ditching him and his projects.

Brett Ratner, right, with Jean-Luc Brunel

Like Epstein and Brunel, like Trump and most of his slobbering running buddies, Brett briefly operated a “model agency” called Rush Model Management with Russell Simmons. Ratner later admitted the agency was just a ploy to pick up women (Simmons admitted that’s how he captured his first wife when she was just 16).

How did this actual piggy land a share of the Bezos spoils? First, he shared the tendency of all the men in Melania’s orbit to treat actual women like mannequins. And, she’s fine with that, “It was born of him hanging out with her when her book came out,” one Hollywood insider told me. “He went on and on about how great it is, when it’s actually a big branding ad.”

Another said, “Somebody from the family picked him: Amazon wouldn’t pick him .”

And indeed, family he is. Ratner is reportedly now housed in a big house on Mar-a-Lago grounds – a craven public relations sentry who can produce expensive bullshit makes a much more suitable pet than any canine for the dog-averse Trumps. And Trumpland has been very, very good for him: he is now working on a documentary about the Abraham Accords.

All this is not to imply that the story of Melania could not be an interesting documentary. But it’s unlikely anyone will dare try, even if Michael Wolff manages to drag her into court to answer questions about Epstein and her timeline. The most interesting thing about Melania is the lacuna in her history between coming in second in a Slovenian top model contest in 1992 and washing up in Manhattan as Trump’s girlfriend. Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan wrote in her 2020 biography of Melania that she had an easier time writing about royals and drug cartel kingpins than the president’s soigné third wife.

Your Freakshow guide knows a little about this because in 2017, I worked on a book about the six women closest to Trump: German grandma Elisabeth, Scottish ma Mary Anne, the three wives, and Ivanka. Since four of these women are or were immigrants, reporting required dashes from a remote Hebridean island across Mitteleuropa. I learned some genuinely interesting things. Grandma Elisabeth started the Trump Organization. Mother Mary Anne, the tenth child of a Gaelic-speaking peasant fisherman, got her start in the U.S. as a maid in the Carnegie Mansion. Collectivist-educated, Russian-speaking Czech Ivana transitioned from communism to capitalism with legendary élan.

The only thing Melania had in common with those women, besides seeing Donald naked, was her non-American accent. She could barely speak English in 2015 and that was because, as far as I could tell, she spent most of her married years before the White House holed up with her Slovenian parents and sister, who had hit the chain migration jackpot and were living in apartments in Trump properties. She was an introverted beauty without any interests or pursuits beyond, as the late Vogue editor André Leon Talley noted, moisturizing herself and perhaps enjoying the feel and sound of pearls and diamonds clacking on a marble vanity.

The Italian toymaking heir and longtime Trump hanger-on Paolo Zampolli has taken credit for introducing Melania and Donald in 1998. He conceded in an interview with me that her arrival coincided with an oversupply of East European beauties, all self-commodified and seeking fame and fortune in the capital of capitalist America. There was not enough room for all of them at the top. Some of his models, he said, were really just party girls (Zampolli did not represent Melania as one of those).

There is a discrepancy between when she and Trump say they met and what she told photographer Alé De Basseville*, who shot the infamous “lesbian” pictures of her in 1995 for a British “lad” magazine. According to him, Melania Knavs told everyone at the shoot about her boyfriend, Donald Trump. I published that in the book and mentioned it in an article for the London Telegraph. Melania threatened the paper with a letter from notorious libel lawyer Charles Harder. The Telegraph yanked and apologized for running the story – precisely the discredit on my name they were after. But her people didn’t challenge the book in the U.S., where truth is an absolute defense. My lawyer’s response to the London shenanigans is here.

In small-town Slovenia, people were afraid to talk openly about her. Her lawyer had threatened a baker for selling a First Lady cake. Others had been more quietly and sinisterly visited, frightened into silence. Back in New York, people either shared rumors or knew nothing. The only thing I can report is that the fashion world was unanimous that she had never been the “supermodel” Trump claimed she was on campaign stages.

Many journalists have faced big threats and lawsuits, or have been forced to apologize and retract, for reporting on the mystery of Melania’s dark years.

This movie most certainly will not open that locked door.

*De Basseville has produced a lovely line of t-shirts featuring the nude First Lady of the United States. They make great Valentines and early Mother’s Day presents. Check them out here. Oh, and they’re Made in America.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow