Melania Trump Uses Event With Freed Hostages to Promote Her Documentary

Melania Trump has been busy promoting her new documentary Melania, which pulled in upwards of $7 million at the box office since it premiered last Thursday at the Kennedy Center. Melania’s opening weekend haul is impressive considering it’s a documentary, and less impressive considering Amazon coughed up $40 million for the rights of the project, and another $35 million to promote it.

The first lady wants Americans to keep hitting the theaters, and she isn’t going to let a meeting with freed Israeli hostages keep her from putting out the word. 

Keith and Aviva Siegel were both taken hostage by Hamas in 2023. Aviva was freed that November, but Keith remained in captivity for almost 16 months. Melania Trump sat down with Aviva in New York last January, a meeting that was depicted in Melania, and both Aviva and her now-freed husband came by the White House on Wednesday.

“It was [an] emotional meeting, and it is captured on camera and available to see in my film Melania,” the first lady said of her meeting with Aviva last year.

Trump was asked later why she felt it was appropriate to use an official White House event to promote the documentary. “This is not promotion,” the first lady replied. “We are here celebrating the release of the hostages, of Aviva and Keith. They were in Washington, D.C., and they called me and said they would like to come over to thank me and to give hugs and that’s why we are here.”

“It’s nothing to do with promotion,” Melania Trump added, minutes after plugging her new film, for which she reportedly personally pocketed the majority of the $40 million Amazon paid to license it.

There is nothing technically illegal about Melania Trump profiting from the documentary. “The first lady is, for ethical purposes, considered to be a private citizen, and so the conflicts-of-interest statutes, the regulations for other executive branch employees, simply don’t apply,” Don Fox, the former acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, recently told Rolling Stone.
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But just because it isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it’s ethical, or at the very least unseemly. The bidding war for the project took place in the weeks following Donald Trump’s 2024 election win as Big Tech and Hollywood studios jockeyed for a spot in the incoming president’s good graces. The $40 million Amazon wound up paying, the most it had ever put up for a piece of content, was widely seen as a way for Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Trump. The two dined at Mar-a-Lago, along with Melania, just weeks before Amazon scored the rights to the first lady’s vanity project.

The film premiered last Thursday at a glitzy event at the Kennedy Center, and the president has on multiple occasions implored Americans to go out and see the film that will help further enrich his family. Now the first lady is using a White House event with freed Israeli-American hostages as a platform to do the same — not that the Trumps have ever had any qualms about using the nation’s highest public office to line their pockets.