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A bronze statue of First Lady Melania Trump in her Slovenian hometown has been vandalized and stolen.
The statue, unveiled in Sevnica five years ago during her husband’s first term, was hacked off at the ankles before it disappeared Tuesday, Slovakian police said.
“A theft was reported on May 13, and immediately police officers visited the crime scene and launched an investigation,' police spokeswoman Alenka Drenik Rangus said.
The life-size sculpture was created after a previous wooden statue, created by local artist Aleš Župevc, was torched in July 2020. That piece was cut from the trunk of a linden tree, and depicted Melania in a dress similar to her outfit at Trump’s first presidential inauguration in 2017.
Brad Downey, the conceptual artist behind the bronze replacement, is originally from Kentucky. He previously told The Guardian that the replica statue was motivated by “frustrations with the policies of my birth country.”
“On the one hand we have people being held in cages on the US border with Mexico, on the other, in what is to me a clear contradiction, we have a first lady who is the first ever for whom English is not her mother tongue, whose US citizenship was fast-tracked on a visa reserved for immigrants with extraordinary ability,” he said in 2020. “I felt I could isolate this contradiction and make a portrait of it.”
Melania was born Melanija Knavs in Sevnica, a small town in the foothills of the Alps with a population of roughly 17,000 people. She moved to the U.S in the 1990s pursue a modeling career, meeting her future husband Donald Trump in 1998.
The statue theft comes days after biographer Michael Wolff claimed that Trump and his wife were living in a “separated” marriage, after reports suggested she had spent less than two weeks at the White House since the president’s inauguration.
English (US) ·