Stephanie Winston Wolkoff

Wolkoff came out of the New York fashion business, where she ran special events for Vogue and produced the Met Gala for a decade. She helped stage the 2017 presidential inauguration and then served as an unpaid adviser to Melania Trump at the White House. She left in February 2018, after reporting that the inaugural committee had paid close to twenty-six million dollars to WIS Media Partners, a firm she had set up, most of which went on to subcontractors. Melania and Me, published in 2020, is her account of the friendship and its end, and it quotes conversations she recorded without telling the other party. The first lady's spokeswoman called the book untrue and the taping dishonest. The Justice Department sued Wolkoff that October over a confidentiality agreement, and the case was dropped after the change of administration.