Melania Trump - Barron bullied over false Autism claims

Post Reply New Topic

Melania Trump has disclosed that her son Barron is not “autistic”—and claimed that he was bullied in person and online because Rosie O’Donnell tweeted the false claim.

The former first lady addressed long-running claims that the youngest of Donald Trump’s five children may be on the autism spectrum in her new memoir, Melania, which is published on Tuesday. The Daily Beast has seen a copy of the 184-page book.

The book frequently attacks critics of both Melania and her husband, rehashing many of the controversies involving the couple since Trump ran for election in 2015.

But it is the passage on O’Donnell which may be the most vitriolic about one of the couple’s perceived enemies—and most enlightning about Barron, whose privacy Melania had, until now, fiercely guarded.

The clash with O’Donnell started when Barron, now 18, was the subject of a cruel viral video in November 2016 which purported to show that his behavior had signs of autism spectrum disorder, including not slapping his hands together when he clapped at the end of his father’s speech to the Republican National Convention that year.

The video was given rocket fuel when O’Donnell, the comedian and former co-host of The View, tweeted about it in apparent sympathy, saying that it was an “opportunity to bring attention” to what she called “the autism epidemic”.

“I was appalled by such cruelty,” Melania writes. “It was clear to me that she was not interested in raising awareness about autism. I felt that she was attacking my son because she didn’t like my husband.”

The former first lady makes clear that she had watched every second of the video, which was later deleted by the person who posted it, writing, “Someone had painstakingly compiled the footage and added captions like, ‘His hands are moving erratically and aren’t touching each other. Then he was spotted making strange movements in his seat, typical of children with autism.’”

But, Melania says, his behavior was normal for his age; at the time of the 2016 RNC in Cleveland, Barron was 10.

“There is nothing shameful about autism (though O’Donnell’s tweet implied that there was), but Barron is not autistic,” she writes.

She accuses O’Donnell of “sheer malice,” and calls it “devastating as a parent.” “It felt like my heart was breaking into pieces.”

O’Donnell deleted the tweet and apologized for it, saying that one of her daughters was on the autism spectrum, shortly after Melania hired a hard-charging attorney to go after the original poster, who also deleted the video.

But in the book she writes, “Barron’s experience of being bullied both online and in real life following the incident is a clear indication of the irreparable damage caused.” It is the first time she has suggested that bullying of Barron went beyond online trolling and into his offline experience as a child.

She also attributes O’Donnell’s tweet to the long-running feud between the comedian and her husband, which started in 2006 and which was pursued obsessively by the then-star of The Apprentice on Twitter for years.

Let’s go back to 2016 when this whole thing started. If I was in her situation I would be in a panic that now that this norm about using and writing about children of public figures has been broken this will not only be the start of this norm becoming normalized but what else is going to to become an acceptable way of speculating about and using my child is going to be acceptable.

You mean the way her husband has trashed opponents' children since forever? He's a main reason it's such a problem now, and yet her child was protected from the public in a way that no other President's children have been.

They're all such whiners. She's not all that much different than the family she married into.

Basically, don't dish it out if you can't take it.