Ivana Trump Found Dead In NYC Home Falling Down Flight Of Stairs

Ivana Trump, the businesswoman who was most well-known for being the first wife of Donald Trump and the mother of his three eldest children, was found dead in her home on Thursday in New York over what is believed to be an accidental fall.

Ivana was born in the now-Czech Republic in 1949. A competitive skier who once claimed that she was an alternate in the 1972 Winter Olympics, she met Trump during a work trip in 1976, where they fell in love before getting married in 1977, according to the BBC.

From then on, the media saw her and Trump as a power couple, and she held roles in his empire and company as a chief executive of his Atlantic City hotel as well as a the manager of the Plaza Hotel, the Daily Beast reported.

However, her marriage with Trump deteriorated significantly by the early 1990s due to his cheating and his jealousy of his more-ascendant wife. Their divorce was a fixture of the tabloids at the time, and she received over $14 million and a mansion in Connecticut.

She was married twice more after Trump: to Italian businessman Riccardo Mazzucchelli from 1995-1997, and to actor Rossano Rubicondi, whom she had an on-again, off-again relationship with until his death in 2021.

On Thursday, authorities discovered Ivana’s body at the bottom of a staircase in her Manhattan home, reportedly unresponsive and unconscious, before declaring her dead later on. It is believed that her death was accidental.

“Ivana Trump was a survivor,” the Trump family said in a statement. “She fled from communism and embraced this country. She taught her children about grit and toughness, compassion and determination. She will be dearly missed by her mother, her three children & 10 grandchildren.”

“Mom was brilliant, charming, passionate and wickedly funny. She modelled strength, tenacity and determination in her every action. She lived life to the fullest - never forgoing an opportunity to laugh and dance,” Ivanka Trump, Ivana’s eldest daughter with whom she reportedly had a close relationship with, said in a statement.