Breaking down rumor Melania was an escort before meeting Trump at Ghislaine Maxwell party

In December 2025, social media posts on sites including X and Facebook shared images claiming that Melania Trump, the U.S. first lady, worked as an escort before she met her now-husband, President Donald Trump. 

According to the posts, Melania Trump began escorting under a man named Paolo Zampolli, who was good friends with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein was arrested on charges of child sex trafficking in 2019 and was later found dead by suicide in his jail cell. Maxwell was convicted of child sex trafficking in 2021.

Snopes readers searched the site looking for more information about these allegations, which we determined are unsupported by credible evidence. 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 Epstein introduced the two in 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 the claim was “outright lying.” She 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 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 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.)

In sum, there’s no evidence that the claim, which came from a tabloid with a history of spreading unfounded rumors, has any basis in reality.

The rumor may have seemed believable because it sprinkled in small tidbits of true information. According to reporting from Today and The Times of London, the Trumps did indeed meet at a party hosted by 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 unfounded and has no evidence supporting it. 

Images shared alongside the claim sometimes contained an incomplete link to an article from Politico. That article may be a 2019 story detailing Maxwell’s network of connections that mentioned Zampolli. According to the article, he was reportedly involved in the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, an initiative created by a Maxwell-run charity named TerraMar. It is unclear how often the two interacted. 

Finally, the photo of Melania Trump with her roommate Matthew Atanian often attached to post spreading the rumor was legitimate. It appeared in a Times of London article published in 2016. Some posts claimed the photo showed Trump with Zampolli, and in one copypasta (text repeatedly copied and shared verbatim online), Atanian’s name was misspelled as “Matthew Arabian.”

Sources