I Don’t Care That Melania Trump Was a Sex Worker and Neither Should You

When Donald Trump lubed up and committed to actually, for real thrusting himself into the American race to be president, I made a little promise to myself. I won’t slut-shame his wife, former model Melania Trump. I won’t slut-shame her in a blog. I won’t slut-shame her on a log. I won’t slut-shame her in a tweet. I won’t slut-shame her with some meat.

This was always going to be a problem, both from Donald’s GOP Primary detractors and from the left as well. Melania is a rather appropriately atypical First Lady material thanks to her modeling career, and literally the first picture I ever saw of this woman was a tasteful nude composition. Since securing the nomination, the tabloids have been digging through her past trying to find two things: a picture of her nipples and maybe proof she’s had non-marital dick in her. Ah, journalism, where a picture of Taylor Swift’s uncovered right tit taken with a telephoto lens is probably worth more than I’ve ever been paid as a writer.

Well, they did find Mrs. Trump’s nipples, and a shot of her in a Sapphic pose to boot (no, I’m not linking to them). The New York Post managed to find a set of prints from a mid-‘90s shoot done in Manhattan for a now-defunct French magazine called Max that shows her naked and in bed with Scandinavian model Emma Erikkson, as well as more traditional nude shots.

Then, a story from the Slovenian magazine Suzy (are all European magazines just first names like Beyoncé?) ran a front page story that the modeling agency Melania was signed to also operated as an escort service. Inquisitr and Daily Mail picked it up, and suddenly everyone was talking about the fact that Melania was a sex worker.

But more than that, it really shouldn’t have mattered that she had been an escort, and the entire brouhaha over the whole mess got me really depressed by my own side of the aisle.