Maryanne Trump Barry was a retired federal judge and the older sister of President Donald Trump
FILE PHOTO: US property tycoon Donald Trump is pictured with his sister Maryanne Trump Barry at the Aberdeen Exhibition & Conference centre, Scotland, on June 10, 2008. © Ed JONES / AFP
Maryanne Trump Barry, 86, the oldest sibling of former US President Donald Trump, was found dead on Monday in her New York City apartment.
Police found her lifeless body inside the 5th Avenue apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side at around 4am, according to the Post Millennial. The city’s medical examiner has not yet announced the cause of death, but police said there were no signs of trauma or foul play.
Born in 1937, Maryanne was the oldest of the five Trump brothers and sisters. She was nominated to the US District Court in New Jersey by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, and to the US Court of Appeals (Third Circuit) by President Bill Clinton in 1999. Barry Trump became an inactive judge in 2016 and retired in 2019, leaving the public eye during her brother’s presidency.
“I knew better even as a child than to even attempt to compete with Donald,” she told New York magazine in 2002. “I wouldn’t have been able to win. He was building models when he was very young. Huge buildings.”
Maryanne went to college at Mount Holyoke and got her master’s at Columbia University in 1962. She married David Desmond, with whom she had a son who would go on to become a psychologist and humorist. Six years after giving birth, Maryanne went to Hofstra University’s law school and began a career in law.
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She described her first job out of law school as “one of two women assistant US attorneys in an office of 63 US attorneys, and the first woman to do criminal work appearing only before male judges.”
After divorcing Desmond, Maryanne married John Barry, an attorney who often worked on cases for the Trump Organization, her brother’s company. Barry passed away in 2000.
