Melania Trump also known as Melania Knauss was born in April 26, 1970. She is a Slovene American former model who is married to American businessman and President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump.
Born in Slovenia, she became a permanent resident of the United States in 2001 and a citizen in 2006. She will assume the role of First Lady of the United States on January 20, 2017.
Melania was born in Novo Mesto in southeastern Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia) on April 26, 1970. She is the daughter of Amalija and Viktor Knavs, who managed car and motorcycle dealerships for a state-owned vehicle manufacturer, and was a member of the Slovenian Communist Party. Her father was from the nearby town of Radece. Her mother came from the village of Raka, and was a patternmaker at the children's clothing manufacturer "Jutranjka" in Sevnica. Melania has a sister, Ines, and an older half-brother, whom she reportedly has never met, from her father's previous relationship.
She grew up in a modest apartment in a concrete housing block in Sevnica, in Slovenia's Lower Sava Valley. When she was a teenager, the family moved to a two-story house near Sevnica and used a high-rise apartment in Ljubljana.
Melania attended the Secondary School of Design and Photography in Ljubljana and studied at the University of Ljubljana for one year before dropping out.
She speaks six languages: her native Slovenian, and then Serbian, English, French, Italian and German.
She, through her lawyer Michael Wildes, has indicated that she first entered the United States on a business visitor visa in August 1996. She obtained an H-1B visa in October 1996. After that, she regularly returned to Slovenia to obtain a series of four more one-year work visas because, at the time, one-year visas were all that were permitted under the U.S. agreement with Slovenia. She obtained a green card and became a lawful permanent resident in 2001, applying as a model of �extraordinary ability�. She obtained U.S. citizenship in 2006, the year after her marriage.
In November 2016 the Associated Press reported that Trump was paid $20,056 for 10 modeling jobs in the United States in 1996 before she had legal permission to work in the country. According to Wildes, the documents on which AP relied "have not been verified, [and] do not reflect our records including corresponding passport stamps.
The 1.8m tall beauty was signed on by a modelling agency in Milan and went on to appear on numerous magazine covers including Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair. She also posed naked on a white rug for British magazine GQ.
