Ivanka Trump broke down as she opened up on losing her mother, revealing that she sought professional mental health help to cope with back-to-back personal crises that hit within weeks of each other.
Ivanka Trump, 44, speaking on the Diary of a CEO podcast, became tearful while discussing the sudden death of her mother, Ivana Trump, in July 2022, and the toll it took on her family.
Ivana, 73, was found unconscious at the bottom of the stairs at her Manhattan home and died the same day. The New York City medical examiner announced that Donald Trump’s first wife died from “blunt impact injuries of the torso.”
“Losing a parent—it hits different,” Ivanka said. “Especially unexpectedly, especially post-COVID because it robbed us of so many years.”
The timing made it worse. Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner—who had first been diagnosed with thyroid cancer while serving in the Trump White House in 2019—underwent a second surgery in August 2022, just weeks after Ivana’s death.
Ivanka said she turned to therapy during that period to process the grief. “I wanted to make sure I’m really good at being tough,” she said in a rare candid moment from the Trump family.
Among the rawest moments came when Ivanka spoke about her three children never having the chance to truly know their grandmother. Her own grandmother, Babi, now 99, lives with the family in Miami.
“It’s a blessing to have her in our home,” Ivanka said, “telling her stories and stories of my mother, who they sadly didn’t get to know.”
She described how, during her grief, she would “talk about her and start to cry, just like I’m still doing—but in a different way, like I was avoiding.”
Ivana, born in what is now the Czech Republic, built a career as a model and businesswoman in New York after marrying Donald Trump in 1977. The couple had three children, Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric. They divorced in 1992. He married singer and model Marla Maples in 1993, before divorcing in 1999. He and the current first lady, Melania Trump, tied the knot in 2005.
The Diary of a CEO interview landed around the same time as a separate, rather less flattering family revelation. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie alleged earlier this week that Donald Trump once asked him to dig up damaging information on the Kushner family in an attempt to break up Ivanka’s relationship with her eventual husband before they married in October 2009.
Christie, speaking at a Harvard event, said the request came while he was still U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. “It became clear to Donald Trump that they were going to get married,” Christie said. “He was not thrilled, let’s say.”
Trump allegedly took Christie to dinner to make the ask directly. “He said, ‘Do you have anything more on the family, so I can break this up?’” Christie recalled. His response, he said, was to think: “Haven’t I given you enough?”
