When and where did Melania and Donald Trump first meet?
Executive summary
Melania Knauss and Donald Trump first crossed paths in New York in September 1998 at a New York Fashion Week party — widely reported to have been hosted by modeling agent Paolo Zampolli at the Kit Kat Club — where Trump, already a public figure, approached the then-24-year-old model while he was on a date with another woman [1] [2] [3]. Most contemporary timelines and profiles, including Business Insider, South China Morning Post and multiple timeline pieces, place the encounter in September 1998 and identify the Kit Kat Club Fashion Week party as the setting [1] [2] [3].
1. The commonly reported who, when and where
Major outlets and timelines agree that the meeting happened in September 1998 in Manhattan at a Fashion Week party associated with Paolo Zampolli, with many accounts specifying the Kit Kat Club as the venue; Business Insider cites Vanity Fair’s reporting tying the encounter to Zampolli’s party at the Kit Kat Club during New York Fashion Week [1], and the South China Morning Post gives a similar account confirming September 1998 and the same party host [2].
2. How both principals have described the moment
Melania herself has repeatedly recounted that she was introduced to Donald Trump at a fashion-industry event in New York, that Trump asked for her number while accompanied by another date, and that she initially declined to give it before later calling the number he provided — details she shared in interviews and which publications have summarized in timeline pieces [4] [3]. Vanity Fair and other contemporary profiles amplify that narrative: Trump approached her at the party, expressed interest, and the two later began dating [1].
3. Conflicting dates and an outlier source
Not every source is identical: one Palm Beach Post item — summarizing material from Melania’s memoir excerpts posted in 2025 — describes the meeting as occurring in September 1988, an outlier that conflicts with the broad corpus of reporting that places the encounter a decade later in 1998 [5]. Given the overwhelming weight of sources citing 1998 (including Business Insider, SCMP, Today timelines and multiple contemporary profiles), the 1988 date appears anomalous in the available reporting and likely a typographical or contextual error in that Palm Beach Post summary [1] [2] [6] [5].
4. Context and immediate aftermath
Contemporaneous context reported across outlets is that Melania had moved to the United States in 1996 to pursue modeling and was working in Manhattan when she met Trump at the Fashion Week party [7] [1]. Reports note that Trump was separated from his second wife, Marla Maples, around that period, and that after the party the two went on to date sporadically before their relationship solidified over the following years [1] [2]. Timeline accounts trace subsequent milestones — the proposal at the 2004 Met Gala and marriage in 2005 — back to that initial 1998 meeting as the origin point of their long public partnership [3] [2].
5. Why the 1998 account persists and what it leaves unanswered
The 1998 Fashion Week-story has been reiterated by profiles, timelines and interviews across outlets for years because it neatly fits the known chronology (Melania’s U.S. arrival in 1996, modeling work in New York, and the couple’s later public life), and because both participants and third-party chroniclers repeatedly reference the same scene and participants, especially Paolo Zampolli’s party [7] [1] [2]. What reporting does not fully settle — and what these sources do not claim to definitively document — are minute details such as the exact day in September, every witness list, or contemporaneous photographic evidence placing both people in the same frame at that specific event; those gaps leave room for small discrepancies like the anomalous 1988 date in one summary [5].