In September, Ms. Haydon, who is living in a rental apartment, paid $6.4 million in a cash deal for a three-bedroom condominium on Fifth Avenue and 86th Street with two terraces and a library. The apartment, which is undergoing a renovation, was purchased from Elizabeth Ailes, the widow of the former Fox News executive Roger Ailes, said Carol Staab, Ms. Ailes’s real estate broker.
Ms. Haydon said in an email that the family would not be making any statements. “We all love Vanessa, and support her in any way we can,” she wrote. The Trump Organization did not comment.
Ms. Trump, 40, grew up in Manhattan.
Her father, Charles Haydon (born Charles Hochman) was a lawyer. His clients included Solomon Schwartz, who in the 1980s was charged with trying to smuggle 500 rifles and ammunition into Poland, and Abe Hirschfeld, the eccentric real estate mogul who was tried for tax fraud but not convicted. Her mother, around 30 years his junior, ran Kay Models, a small modeling agency.
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Growing up, Ms. Trump was not a particularly distinguished student. She attended the Dwight School on the Upper West Side. In her high school yearbook, Ms. Trump was described both as most likely to “be on Ricki Lake” and to “get a divorce.”
After high school, Ms. Trump was a model with Wilhelmina Models, the agency once known for representing supermodels including Iman. In the late 1990s, Ms. Trump and her younger sister, Veronika, became fixtures of the Manhattan party scene, hanging out at bottle service clubs during the era of Moomba and Veruka.
“They were pretty girls who liked getting photographed,” said Lizzie Grubman, the publicist, who sometimes squired them around and said she couldn’t now remember whether she was paid to do publicity for the sisters or simply helped them out.
During that time, the sisters had several turns in the tabloids. According to a 1998 item in Star, Leonardo DiCaprio was said to have “fallen hard for a stunning young model” named Vanessa Haydon. Mr. DiCaprio’s publicist later said, “he never dated her.” A former classmate from Dwight told New York magazine, “Vanessa played the media really well.”
Not long after Veronika finished high school, she had a child with the restaurateur Stratis Morfogen. In 2001, she and her sister showed up in a New York Post story after visiting the Conscience Point Inn in the Hamptons with Mr. Morfogen. That night, he got into a bar fight with a bouncer. He also opened an unruly nightclub called Sessa, the name that Veronika Haydon’s daughter, who was 3 at the time, used for her aunt because she couldn’t pronounce her full name. Mr. Morfogen and Veronika Haydon later got divorced. He now operates a restaurant on East 60th Street.
Donald Trump Jr. entered Vanessa’s life at a 2003 fashion show for a Kmart brand at Capitale, a nightclub on the Lower East Side; the brand was fronted by the musician Thalía. Ms. Grubman was representing the brand and sitting near the elder Mr. Trump, who introduced Vanessa to his son twice that evening.
The couple made headlines with their engagement in 2004. The younger Mr. Trump proposed with a $100,000 ring that he got for free by agreeing to stage his proposal before paparazzi at the Short Hills Mall where the jeweler of the ring, Bailey Banks & Biddle, was located. The move frustrated his father, who complained about it on “Larry King Live.” (The publicity ploy ultimately didn’t work. By 2009, Bailey Banks & Biddle was in bankruptcy and the Short Hills location was closed.)
The couple was married at Mar-a-Lago in November 2005. During the ceremony, guests including Bo Dietl, the police detective turned TV commentator, and Sophie Dahl, the model and author, were seated around a swimming pool.
Christine Schott, who at the time worked as a model manager and publicist for Ms. Trump, was there, and staying at Mar-a-Lago. She spent at least some of the night helping the press keep straight which blond matron was the bride’s mother and which was the groom’s. “The paparazzi kept having to ask me who was who because Ivana looked so much like Vanessa’s mother,” she said. “They both were tall with big blond buns.”
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