Donald Trump's first wife Ivana Trump, 73, has died, the former U.S. president said on Thursday.
"I am very saddened to inform all of those that loved her, of which there are many, that Ivana Trump has passed away at her home in New York City," Donald Trump said in a post on the social medial platform Truth Social.
The couple married in 1977 and divorced in 1992. They had three children together: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.
"Ivana Trump was a survivor. She fled from communism and embraced this country. She taught her children about grit and toughness, compassion and determination," the Trump family said in a statement quoted by ABC News. She grew up under Communist rule in the former Czechoslovakia."
Neither the Trump family statement nor the post from the former president mentioned the cause of her death.
The Trumps were a power couple in New York in the 1980s before their divorce.
In recent years, Ivana Trump had been on good terms with her former husband. She wrote in a 2017 book that they spoke about once a week.
She told the New York Post in 2016 that she was both a supporter and adviser to the former president.
“I suggest a few things,” she told the paper.
“We speak before and after the appearances and he asks me what I thought.”
She said she advised him to “be more calm”.
“But Donald cannot be calm,” she added. “He’s very outspoken. He just says it as it is.”
She was born Ivana Zelnickova in 1949 in the Czechoslovak city of Gottwaldov, the former city of Zlin that just had been renamed by the Communists, who took over the country in 1948.
Additional reporting by PA
