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Melania Trump’s Speechwriter Takes Responsibility for Lifted Remarks For Melania Trump’s Speechwriter, a Longtime Passion for Writing Leads Into a Storm
(about 7 hours later)
CLEVELAND — A longtime employee of the Trump Organization took responsibility for lifting two passages, from a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama, for Melania Trump’s address on Monday at the Republican National Convention, saying that it was an innocent mistake. CLEVELAND — In her mid-30s and slowed by injuries, Meredith McIver, a classically trained ballerina who had danced under the limelight with Balanchine and the ensembles of Broadway musicals, decided to pursue her passion for writing.
The employee, Meredith McIver, who has worked on some of Mr. Trump’s books, appears to be one of the few people to apologize for an error at any point during the Trump campaign. The New York Times on Tuesday night identified Ms. McIver as playing a role in the speech, although the extent of her involvement was unclear, and the Trump campaign declined to answer questions. Ms. McIver was brought in after Ms. Trump discarded the majority of a draft written by two professional speechwriters. She tried her hand at short stories and poems in the style of Dylan Thomas before finding work writing advertising copy. “She was always very, very interested in writing as an art form,” said an ex-boyfriend, Stephen Palitz. He said Ms. McIver brought a dancer’s discipline, precision and rigor to her work. “She’s adept at crystallizing phrases and saying things in an elegant straightforward way.”
Ms. McIver identified herself in an unusual statement posted on the Trump campaign’s website, hours after the chief strategist, Paul Manafort, said the issue was manufactured by the news media. And it breathed new life into a story now in its third day. This week, Ms. McIver returned to center stage for her writing, but not in the manner she might have hoped.
“In working with Melania on her recent first lady speech, we discussed many people who inspired her and messages she wanted to share with the American people,” Ms. McIver wrote. “My name is Meredith McIver and I’m an in-house staff writer at the Trump Organization,” began an extraordinary statement she released Wednesday morning in which she took the blame for the disastrous plagiarism of Michelle Obama in Melania Trump’s prime-time speech Monday at the Republican National Convention.
“A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama,” she added. In the statement, Ms. McIver, a 65-year-old co-author of several books with Donald J. Trump, said that as she and Ms. Trump were preparing her speech, Ms. Trump mentioned that she admired Mrs. Obama and read to Ms. McIver parts of the first lady’s 2008 speech at the Democratic convention.
“Over the phone,” Ms. Trump “read me some passages from Mrs. Obama’s speech as examples. I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech. I did not check Mrs. Obama’s speeches. This was my mistake and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant.” Ms. McIver said she had inadvertently left portions of the Obama speech in the final draft. “This was my mistake,” she wrote. She wrote that she had offered her resignation, but that the Trumps had rejected it. “Mr. Trump told me that people make innocent mistakes and that we learn and grow from these experiences.”
She said that she had “offered my resignation to Mr. Trump and the Trump family but they rejected it,” and that “Mr. Trump told me that people make innocent mistakes and we learn and grow from these experiences.” “I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs. Obama,” Ms. McIver wrote. “No harm was meant.”
She continued: “I asked to put out the statement because I did not like seeing the way this was distracting from Mr. Trump’s historic campaign for president and Melania’s beautiful message and presentation. I apologize for the confusion and hysteria my mistake has caused. Today, more than ever, I am honored to work for such a great family.” But harm was of course done.
The Trump campaign had strongly pushed back on claims that Mr. Manafort and his team were behind the listed passages, which marred Ms. Trump’s first major foray into politics and served as a significant embarrassment. An hour before the statement was released, showing no hint of giving in to critics or conceding a mistake, Mr. Trump accused the news media of holding a microscope to his wife and employed one of his favorite phrases about publicity. After a Twitter user discovered the plagiarism, the story of the cribbed lines hung over the convention and eclipsed the otherwise positive response to Ms. Trump’s speech. Her husband’s warring advisers pointed fingers at one another. His family was furious. The campaign chairman said that he believed Ms. Trump wrote the speech herself, as she asserted, and that it would be “crazy” to think she would crib lines when all of America was watching.
“Good news is Melania’s speech got more publicity than any in the history of politics especially if you believe that all press is good press!” Mr. Trump wrote in one Twitter post. Ms. McIver, a registered Democrat with no known political experience, was suddenly at the center of the biggest political story in the country. Mr. Palitz, a lawyer who has remained friends with Ms. McIver for decades, said that knowing her generally meticulous attention to detail, “it sounds like she sort of stepped up and fell on her sword.”
In a quick follow-up, he added, “The media is spending more time doing a forensic analysis of Melania’s speech than the F.B.I. spent on Hillary’s emails.” The daughter of ballroom dancers, Ms. McIver, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, grew up in Northern California, before coming to New York at age 14 on a Ford Foundation scholarship for dance. She studied at the School of American Ballet, the official school of the New York City Ballet, from 1965 through 1970. She then went to dance out west, Mr. Palitz said, and enrolled at the University of Utah. An English major, she graduated magna cum laude in 1976.
The investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was the secretary of state lasted nearly a year. She returned to New York and in 1981 danced in the company of the revival of “Can Can” at the Minskoff Theater in New York. It closed after five performances. (“It is tireless in its attempts to please the audience,” The New York Times wrote in its review. “But mediocre material, no matter how it’s sliced, is still mediocre material.”)
Mr. Trump’s defense of his wife came as the campaign tried to move beyond questions about how two passages in Ms. Trump’s speech closely mirrored the address by the budding first lady, Mrs. Obama, at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008. She settled on the Upper West Side, and her fashionable dress, dancer’s figure and green eyes turned heads at the grocery. She traveled to the Netherlands and France. In “How to Get Rich,” which she co-wrote with Mr. Trump, she thanked Alain Bernardin, the owner of a famed Paris striptease saloon, the Crazy Horse.
Mr. Trump had stayed silent throughout Tuesday after the speech on Monday night. But dancing eventually took its toll, and after writing lyrics with Mr. Palitz, a classical guitarist, she joined her sister Karen, the art director at the advertising firm Lotas Minard Patton McIver. Around the time Karen left the firm more than a decade later, her sister entered Mr. Trump’s orbit.
Earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Manafort said in televised interviews that it was time to move on. In the past two days he has been adamant that there was no borrowing of language, and that the words in common were familiar phrases. In 2004’s “How to Get Rich,” Mr. Trump wrote: “This book could not have been written without Meredith McIver, a writer of many talents. She served her apprenticeship with the New York City Ballet, worked on Wall Street, and for the past two years has been an executive assistant at The Trump Organization, stationed at a desk outside my office.”
“As you know, my door is always open, so Meredith has heard everything, and she’s taken good notes. She’s done a remarkable job of helping me put my thoughts and experiences on paper. I am tremendously grateful to her.”
And Ms. McIver, who Mr. Trump also called “fast, responsible, and insightful,” seemed grateful to Mr. Trump and to his future wife. In 2005’s “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” Ms. McIver, again a co-author, took the opportunity to acknowledge “Melania Knauss for her kind assistance.”
As she had once dreamed, her name appeared on the covers of books, and she sent copies of them signed by Mr. Trump and inscribed with her own notes to friends, including Mr. Palitz.
“Meredith was a go-to person for a lot of projects — I often heard her name,” said Adam Eisenstat, who wrote for a blog and online newsletter under Mr. Trump’s name for Trump University in 2005 and 2006. “Like, ‘Meredith will take care of it.’ She had an omnibus role in his editorial projects.”
Georgina Levitt, an associate publisher at Vanguard Press, which published a collection of Mr. Trump’s essays called “Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education In Business and Life” in 2010, recalled Ms. McIver — a voracious reader often seen with a bob haircut, tailored blazers and red lipstick — as a helpful liaison to Mr. Trump.
“She obviously was a very strong editorial voice,” Ms. Levitt said. “It seemed like there was a history, an element of trust between them.”
Today, Ms. McIver is considered part of the extended Trump family. “She is terrific, she’s a terrific woman,” Mr. Trump said in an interview Wednesday. “She’s been with us a long time and she just made a mistake.”
“She came in and she said, ‘Mr. Trump, I’d like to say what happened.’ I thought it was such a nice thing. Who knew this was going to be a big story?”