It probably hasn’t escaped your notice (it certainly hasn’t escaped ours) that Melania Trump has litigation on her mind. In the last two days, her lawyers have threatened legal action and demanded apologies from Liberal America, Britain’s Daily Mail, and other news sources, for reporting allegations about her past employment.
You can read our apology here.
But the wife of Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, could find herself having more than just one day in court as suggestions emerge that she has committed perjury by lying under oath.
It happened back in 2013 when she testified against cosmetics company, New Sunshine LLC, after it failed to market a caviar skincare range she had developed and heavily promoted. Breathless sales copy from her website at the time revealed that the range was created:
“Through intense collaboration with Melania’s research laboratory.”
Whether Melania actually has a research laboratory or not was never called into question in the hearing. Her educational status was only questioned in passing, but her answer was significant.
The attorney asked:
“Would you please explain to the judge your formal education including what schools you attended and from which you graduated?”
To which Mrs. Trump answered:
“I attended and graduated from design school, from fashion and industrial design school and also attended, graduated from architecture degree, bachelor degree.”
Here’s a scanned transcript of that exchange, via Racked.
This is where it gets tricky. It’s generally accepted that she did attend some classes at Ljubjiana University in her native Slovenia. But exhaustive research by biographers, as well as CBS News and others, show no record of her graduating with a degree. This directly contradicts her court testimony.
She made the same assertion about her bachelor’s degree in the biography page of her website, which was taken down last month and re-directed to her husband’s standard Trump Organization site. Melania tweeted to explain the re-direct:
Perjury is a criminal offense that is punishable by up to five years in prison.
But instead of dwelling on that gloomy thought, let’s look back to sunnier times, when the glamorous couple were happily boosting their caviar skincare.
Featured image: Disney/ABC Television Group via Flickr available under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivs 2.0 Generic license
