Fifteen years ago, Ivanka Trump appeared in the documentary Born Rich. Among those who appeared in the film, she’s among the few who don’t have to regret doing it.
Even then, at 21, Trump felt the complexities of being wealthy.
In the film, she’s both blonde and brunette.
Town & Country resurrected Jamie Johnson‘s Born Rich Wednesday, saying that it launched Ivanka Trump and “burned” nearly everybody else who appeared in it. (Johnson as in Johnson & Johnson.)
“No matter what I read, the fact is I’m absolutely proud to be a Trump and proud of my family name,” Ivanka said in her segment. “…For awhile, I was worried that for my whole life I’d sort of be under my parents’ shadow. But it’s not a bad shadow to be under, I guess, so, it’s ok.”
As she grew older, she said she became conscious about the way people treated her.
“It wasn’t even my money,” she said. “I was a little kid. I noticed people treating me differently because my parents had money. …I never really understood that. I could give them my parents’ money so I didn’t really think it was a reason to treat me in a different way.”
Ivanka says the one important quality she looks for in her friends is sincerity.
She admits she was always “sheltered.”
She recalled the New York Post cover that informed her that her parents — Donald and Ivana Trump — were getting divorced. “This is before I had officially been told that they were getting divorced,” she said, recalling the swarm of paparazzi that awaited her outside her school.
The tabloid cover was a huge picture of her parents with the word “SPLIT” running vertically between them.
She got riled remembering an experience she once had at a fashion party in Australia.
“This man walks up to me who I’d never met and says, ‘what does it feel like to be wealthy?’ I was like, Excuse me?’ And he goes, ‘what does it feel like to never have felt any pain?'”
It upset her deeply. But not for the reasons you might think.
“Like I was bothered by the fact that he could be so ignorant and like that there are people out there who could like say such a blanketed thing and just be so downright stupid and just not use the brain that they have,” she said. “That’s what bothered me. Not the fact that anything he said really, you know, wounded me deep down. Just the fact that there are people out there who think that. That think that with money comes happiness.”
Watch her in the documentary here.