Unraveling claim Melania was an escort before meeting Trump at Ghislaine Maxwell party

In summer 2025, posts on social media sites such as X and Facebook shared a copypasta (text repeatedly copied and shared verbatim online) claiming that Melania Trump, the U.S. first lady, worked as an escort before she met her now-husband, President Donald Trump. The copypasta also claimed that Melania Trump met Donald Trump at a party hosted by the former socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of child sex trafficking in 2021 due to her connections with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. 

Snopes readers searched the site looking for more information about these allegations, which we determined are unsupported by credible evidence and unfounded. We reached out to the White House for more information, but have not heard back.

The claim that Melania Trump worked as an escort before meeting Donald Trump has been spreading online since at least August 2016, when the U.K.-based tabloid Daily Mail published an article making that allegation. In August 2025, Hunter Biden, the son of former president Joe Biden, claimed that Jeffrey Epstein introduced the two during an interview on Channel 5, a YouTube channel run by journalist Andrew Callaghan.

However, according to the BBC and NPR, Melania Trump sued the Daily Mail and a blogger in the U.S. who also shared the claim for defamation, seeking $150 million in damages. Her lawyer, Charles Harder, told the BBC that the claim was "outright lying." Melania Trump also threatened to sue Hunter Biden for $1 billion, according to the BBC. 

The lawsuits could be viewed as SLAPP suits, a term that "refers to lawsuits brought by individuals and entities to dissuade their critics from continuing to produce negative publicity," according to Cornell University's Legal Information Institute. 

However, both the blogger and the Daily Mail settled the lawsuits, retracted the articles and paid damages to Melania Trump, according to Politico and previous reporting from Snopes. Meanwhile, in a follow-up video published on Channel 5, Biden refused to apologize for his comments, claiming that the information has also been reported by journalist Michael Wolff, who has written 4 books on Trump's time in office, and by The New York Times. (The Times' story says Epstein claimed he introduced the two).

As such, there's no evidence that the information, which came from a source known for spreading unfounded rumors, has any basis in reality.

The claim that the Trumps met at a party hosted by Maxwell is also unfounded. According to reporting from Today and The Times of London, the Trumps met at a party hosted by Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who represented Melania Trump in the 1990s. A 2016 profile of Melania Trump in Harper's Bazaar and a profile of Zampolli published by the digital magazine Air Mail also claimed that he introduced the couple. 

The claim that Zampolli was Melania Trump's "escort agent" might feel somewhat intuitive, given their established connection — it is not unheard of for sex workers to moonlight as models. However, that claim is also unfounded and has no evidence supporting it.

Finally, the photo often attached to the posts, supposedly of Trump with Zampolli, does not match other images of Zampolli published online. It might instead be Trump with "her photographer roommate, Matthew Arabian," but if that's the case, the copypasta got his name wrong. The Times of London article and a 2020 Vanity Fair review of a biography of Trump, "The Art of Her Deal," noted that the roommate's name was Matthew Atanian, not Arabian.