Melania's Message, Harry v. Murdoch, and Jamboree in India
When writer Brad Gooch called to ask me if I had any memories of working with the late French glamour photographer Patrick Demarchelier for a piece he's writing, I went truffle hunting through some of my back issues of Talk magazine. What did I see? A photo that I had long forgotten, something startling different from the new official White House portrait of Melania Trump in which she’s staring down haters in a don’t-mess-with-me black tuxedo suit.
Across a double-page spread in the February 2000 issue, there was the recumbent figure of the young Melania Knauss, Trump’s girlfriend at the time, wearing a scarlet Norma Kamali bikini and stiletto heels, stretched like a gorgeous half-nude catwoman across a rug emblazoned with the presidential seal. Talk stylists, always looking for some antic new angle, had toted a fake Oval Office set, out of shot in this picture, to Demarchelier’s studio in the Meatpacking District, and Trump himself is featured bottom right in front of an American flag speaking into a pretend presidential red hotline phone. “We did some crazy shit in those days,” former editor-at-large Gabe Doppelt texted back when I asked about the picture’s provenance.
Not so crazy, as it turns out. It’s easy to forget that in 1999 Trump was seeking the nomination for leadership of the Reform Party, ultimately won by far-right candidate Pat Buchanan. This ephemeral political moment was, one senses, just a new way for Trump to amuse himself at the time, though it did involve some previews of now-standard meet-and-greet schmoozes at Mar-a-Lago with supporters.
In the Talk picture, Melania shows her lifelong professional willingness to grind out whatever it was that would get her ahead. Booked to model, she briskly completed her assignment to strike a seductive pose on the fake Oval Office rug and answer questions, giving credence to the budding notion of a Trump presidential bid, as she had clearly been instructed. “When we go out for events, everywhere the people are cheering him,” she shared. “They start to scream. They are supporting him: ‘Mr. Trump, don’t stop! Mr. Trump preh-zee-dent!’” before adding that a presidential prerequisite is that “you need to know how to run a beez-ness.” Asked how she might handle the then-preposterous notion that she could be First Lady, she expressed a desire to be like “traditional” First Ladies Jackie Kennedy or Betty Ford.
Coming across this vision of Melania as she was in those hustling cheesecake days, objectified in Talk’s pages like an OnlyFans West Wing theme account, you understand the ferocity behind her choice of that much-memed inauguration hat. Just as Michelle Obama unsheathed her biceps in sleeveless dresses to telegraph strength and Hillary threw off the St. John knits in favor of get-shit-done pantsuits when she ran for office, the current First Lady is well aware her sartorial choices aren’t just a fashion flex. With her face obscured under the severe Amish brim and her suit-of-armor coat dress buttoned to the throat, her inauguration outfit sent the message of a dominatrix governess ready to administer punishment, not to Trump’s political enemies (she can leave that to his appointees), but to all who trifled with her in the past.
Harry Gets Revenge
Prince Harry's big win in his lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper group NGN last week showed that, despite the frostbite his crown jewels endured during that infamous 2011 North Pole expedition, he still has balls of steel.
The British press has been predictably grudging (or outright snarly) about the $12 million settlement and “full and unequivocal” apology Harry extracted from the Murdoch gang. But a broken clock is right once a day and, in this instance, I applaud Harry's belligerence.
In 2013, the UK media world was rocked by the trial that exposed industrial-scale phone hacking by Murdoch’s now extinct News of the World, the targets an explosive who’s who of celebrities, members of Parliament, sports figures, and the young royal princes (plus the ultimate outrage, victims of crimes). Now, Harry has gotten payback not just from The News of the World but, for the first time, from its tabloid NGN sister The Sun.
The legalese of NGN’s apology to Harry for “serious intrusion” into his private life does not begin to convey the Truman Show existence of round-the-clock surveillance Harry’s attorney David Sherborne outlined: more than 100 private eyes deployed on more than 35,000 occasions over 16 years. During research for my 2022 book The Palace Papers, a member of Harry’s circle told me that, when the prince and his then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy learned they had been hacked by the tabloids for years, they felt a flood of relief mixed with their fury. For so long, they had suspected friends were betraying them. But at last, they had the real explanation for the creepy peepers who somehow knew the flight times of Chelsy’s closely held trips to London, the paps who mysteriously learned where to turn up at the lovers’ secret rendezvous, the fake tourists who eavesdropped on them from behind beach loungers. (One repentant PI told the BBC’s Amol Rajan in 2021, “I was basically part of a group of people who robbed him [Harry] of his normal teenage years.”)
But Harry, alas, didn’t get what he most wanted: his day in court to prove that the cover-up went all the way to the top, to what the newsroom grunts referred to as “deep carpet land.” One of Murdoch’s key senior executives who came in after the hacking scandal was exposed was Will Lewis (now publisher and CEO of the Washington Post), who must have been living in a mental sweat lodge since Harry filed his suit six years ago. Lewis was tasked with cleaning up the reputation and ethos of the disgraced company but, ever since, he has been followed by the stench of the question: What else was he sanitizing? In its apology to Harry, NGN, without admitting to any wrongdoing, called its post-phone hacking actions “regrettable”—an adroit way to characterize the monster cover-up alleged by Harry’s lawyer: the erasure of 30 million emails, destruction of back-up tapes, and false denials. Harry wants further police investigations, but there is no appetite for them. Lewis can finally sleep easy.
In the end, the prodigious $12 million settlement is a rounding error for Rupert and the deal circumvented what would have been a courtroom shaming of Murdoch’s UK enterprise. Not that Rupert himself, now chairman emeritus of his news empire, particularly cares. After the scandal of the 2013 phone hacking trial, he was socially persona non grata in London for a year, but that soon passed. In the grand era of “cancellation,” Murdoch is too big to cancel. There was no rescinding of invitations to Sun Valley power conferences, where he could be seen riding around on his golf cart receiving obeisance from fellow billionaires.
In the narrative of The Apprentice movie, it is Machiavellian fixer Roy Cohn who is depicted as Donald Trump’s role model for lying and getting away with it. But perhaps it’s Murdoch who has most perfected the art of normalizing amorality in the corridors of power. Like Trump, Rupert has always thought that virtue is for suckers. (His derogatory expression for any reporting about human rights abuses is “bleeding heart journalism.”)
In 2023, his Fox News paid an eye-watering $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case. It is hard to imagine any corporate leader could recover from such an ethical routing. Texts and emails in the discovery process showed that Fox anchors and producers knew they were lying about the 2020 election outcome, with Rupert’s acquiescence. However, paying a record sum for this malfeasance had no lasting effect on the network’s ratings. Fox News made $3.6 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2025 and clobbered its cable competition in 2024, grabbing more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. And at Trump’s second inauguration, there was the 93-year-old Murdoch (with his fifth wife) grinning like a joyful gargoyle in the rotunda.
As the divided Murdoch dynasty battles over who gets how much control of his media kingdom when the patriarch dies, there should be no doubt about his moral legacy. In his seven decades of global media power, Murdoch has degraded journalism on three continents and given us a president who has made transactional cynicism the new normal. At a moment when the term “a principled stand” sounds positively antique, Prince Harry’s long holdout for a public apology did the memory of his hounded mother proud.
Jamboree in Jaipur
When you read this, I will be in Delhi making a pit stop to see friends before attending the Jaipur Literary Festival, which I first attended in 2006 when it was a quirky, shambolic affair for a few hundred people hosted in the ancient Pink City’s Diggi Palace. It was driven mostly by the enthusiasm of the omnivorous book pasha William Dalrymple, expert on all things Mughal, and his renowned writer friend Namita Gokhale. There was usually some helpful controversy, like in 2012 when the Indian government banned Salman Rushdie from appearing and the festival refused to back down until threats of extremist violence disrupted attempts to have him talk by video link.
Now the annual celebration of words and ideas has exploded into a youthful, annual, 100,000-person jamboree—with few of the old fart retirees who usually populate UK and US lit fests—clearly absorbed by standing-room-only sessions with titles like “Under a Metal Sky: A Journey through Minerals, Greed and Wonder.”
The wonderful thing about India is that all is chaos and then it's perfect. I am always blown away by the teeming country’s massive reading gene. In 2010, at Willie Dalrymple’s request, I persuaded the then-septuagenarian Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka to come to Jaipur. The festival crowd followed him around all day as if he was Timothée Chalamet. As soon as they caught sight of Wole’s nimbus of perpendicular white hair making his way to the stage for his discussion of Yoruba poetry, they all went batshit. Dalrymple is now a bit of a rock star himself thanks to the phenomenal success of his podcast Empire he co-hosts with British author Anita Anand. His new book The Golden Road is about how ancient India transformed the world and was at the heart of Eurasia, a position it hopes to re-establish as the West looks to counter China.
Stay tuned for my dispatches from the color burst that is Jaipur!
I am pleased to read a snarkless piece about Harry. The permanent damage done to a very young man by this sick, sick exploitation can't be repaired with 12 million dollars, but anything that causes the Murdochs heartburn is something...
Am I alone in my despair that there’s no appetite to pursue those who lied under oath and dissembled at NGN? If a murderer was exonerated on the grounds of no DNA evidence then 20 years later such evidence was found, they’d be retried. No one would claim lack of appetite. Where’s justice?