Politics - News Analysis

Conservatives Are Furious With Actor Chris Meloni For Tweeting Naked Photo of Melania Trump

Law and Order SVU actor Chris Meloni appears to be courting controversy after he tweeted a nude picture of Melania Trump from her days as a “model.”

Meloni’s tweet was a tongue-in-cheek response after the first lady’s wardrobe choices in Egypt – during a wider visit to Africa – were criticized for being “colonial”. Melania lamented, “I wish people would focus on what I do, not what I wear.”

People on social media had compared her outfit to that of Colonel Sanders or Meryl Streep from her role in Out of Africa.

Here is one of Meloni’s tweets:

Many people criticized Meloni of shaming the first lady based on a job she used to have.

Meloni also tweeted out this photo, and got a similar response:

Take a look:

Also, it turns out that nude photo Meloni tweeted out was from a shoot in 1995, a year before Melania was legally able to work in the US.

Her original modeling agent in the US, Paolo Zampolli, said that he recruited her to come to New York from Milan and helped her obtain an H1-B visa, which allowed her to stay in the US for three years and do modeling work.

“She never worked illegally for our agency. She always worked with a visa,” Zampolli said. “It’s very easy, very standard, to get a model visa, because she had experience in Europe. Trust me, I don’t want to be lying about this. She had a visa.”

The Trump campaign has not provided details of Melania’s visa history or released her records. Following a report on Politico, she released a statement saying she had always followed the rules. She said she obtained a green card in 2001 and became a U.S. citizen in 2006.
“Let me set the record straight: I have at all times been in full compliance with the immigration laws of this country,” she said on Twitter, after questions about her history were raised in news reports. “Any allegation to the contrary is simply untrue.”

Questions about her immigration status surfaced in the wake of the publication of nude photos taken in New York in 1995, when then-Melania Knauss was 25.

The photos show Melania completely nude, some of her with another woman.

But in interviews, Melania Trump has said she first came to the US in 1996, and that she periodically traveled back to Slovenia in order to stay in compliance with visa rules.

“I followed the law the way it’s supposed to be,” she said on MSNBC in 2016. “I never thought to stay here without papers. I had a visa. I traveled every few months back to the country to Slovenia, to stamp the visa.”

“I came back, I applied for the green card,” she said. “I applied for the citizenship later on.… So I went by the system.”

The statements raise two issues. First, the photographs suggest she was working in the US earlier than she had previously claimed.

Second, if Melania Trump had held an H1-B visa used for working in the US, she would have been allowed to stay for three years and would not have needed to return to her home country, immigration experts said.

Her description of going back and forth from New York and Slovenia is more consistent with a B-1 tourist visa. But such a visa doesn’t permit the person to work, David Leopold, an immigration lawyer in Cleveland, said in an interview.

It is technically fraudulent for a traveler to tell a US immigration officer that a trip is for tourism if he or she is really coming for a job, Leopold said. Such a misrepresentation might even be cause to strip someone’s green card or citizenship, if they did not disclose it at the time they applied for changing their immigration status, Leopold said.

But such violations are common and rarely prosecuted.

“If Melania would release her immigration file, all the questions would be answered,” Leopold said, adding that there’s “no reason not to release the immigration file.”

meet the author

Nicole Hickman James is a lifelong Democrat and political activist who first cut her teeth as a teenager volunteering for Mike Dukakis’ presidential campaign. She has worked and volunteered for John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, HFA (Hillary For America), and Organizing For Action. She’s passionate about liberal and progressive causes and considers President Obama her favorite president ever. She holds her Bachelor’s from Boston College in Economics and her Master's from Columbia, also in Economics. When not working as a writer, she enjoys traveling and spending time with her three college-aged children.

Comments

Comments are currently closed.