MELANIA TRUMP, the former model and third wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, has denied reports that she had worked illegally as an immigrant.
In a statement she said she had followed immigration laws “at all times”, but Mrs Trump has yet to clarify what type of visa she used during a 1995 photo shoot in New York.
Melania Trump said she began working as a model in the US in 1996, but nude photos published at the weekend by the New York Post appear to have been taken in 1995 for a now defunct French magazine.
It is the third controversy about the possible First Lady in less than three weeks, as her husband inflames the political establishment with his divisive campaign for the White House.
“There has been a lot of inaccurate reporting and misinformation concerning my immigration status back in 1996,” Melania Trump said in a statement posted to her Twitter account.
Let me set the record straight: I have at all times been in full compliance with the immigration laws of this country. Period.
“Any allegation to the contrary is simply untrue,” added Mrs Trump, who became a US citizen in 2006, a year after she married the New York billionaire.
Politico raised questions about Melania Trump’s immigration status when she first came to the United States to work as a model in the mid-1990s.
Racy photographs of her, which were published on the front of the New York Post this week, “inadvertently highlight inconsistencies” in the various accounts she has provided over the years, Politico said.
“Immigration experts say there’s even a slim chance that any years-old misrepresentations to immigration authorities could pose legal problems for her today,” the news site reported.
Trump has campaigned aggressively on a platform promising to wipe out illegal immigration to the United States.
Controversy
It is the third controversy to dog the mother of one in less than three weeks.
On 18 July she delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention that plagiarized a speech by First Lady Michelle Obama.
The Trump campaign initially dismissed the scandal as “absurd”, but later admitted it.
A Trump staffer subsequently apologized, saying she had inadvertently included phrases from Obama in the speech – after Melania Trump read them out as examples of the message she wanted to convey.
Last week, Melania also confirmed that her professional website had been deleted after US media questioned its claim that she had a degree in architecture from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.
The website had been removed “because it does not accurately reflect my current business and professional interests,” she tweeted.
— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) July 28, 2016
In recent interviews, Melania Trump herself did not claim that she had a degree, only that she had “studied” design and architecture before dropping out to pursue a modeling career in Milan and later Paris.
After the New York Post published the racy pictures this week, the Trump campaign said the images were “nothing to be embarrassed about” and “a celebration of the human body as art.”
Meanwhile, insiders in the Trump campaign say the former reality tv star is getting “nuttier and nuttier”.
With additional reporting from AFP.
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