Donald Trump Refuses To Condemn Anti-Semitic Abuse of Reporter Who Profiled Melania
Donald Trump said he had no message for supporters who deluged a reporter with anti-Semitic comments after she wrote a critical profile of his wife.
“You’ll have to talk to them about it,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said Wednesday on CNN when told of the abusive phone calls, emaisl and social media posts received by Julia Ioffe after her story appeared in GQ.
“I don’t have a message to the fans, a woman wrote an article that was inaccurate,” he said. Trump, a real estate magnate, said he had not read the article but had heard it was “nasty.”
“I’d like to see my family treated fairly and nicely,” he said.
Melania Trump in a Facebook post last week said the article was inaccurate. The onetime model, who is from Slovenia, also singled out for criticism Ioffe’s revelation of a half brother, born out of wedlock from a relationship her father had before he met her mother.
“My parents are private citizens and should not be subject to Ms. Ioffe’s unfair scrutiny,” Melania Trump said.
Ioffe’s article was critical, but not exceptionally so for a political profile, portraying Melania Trump as hard to pin down on substance and as ambitious while she was a model. It also depicted her as intelligent, poised and loyal to her husband.
Watch the interview here:
Trump doesn’t condemn fans threatening reporter @juliaioffe “I don’t have a message” to fans https://t.co/95d0SnGj2c https://t.co/MI3lx1xVrD
— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) May 4, 2016
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO