Before she was working for her father’s real-estate company — and then his White House — Ivanka Trump tried to make a go of it in modeling. It was a career in which Donald Trump, famous for bedding and wedding models, so keenly wanted his daughter to succeed that he told friends at the time Ivanka would be wise to get breast implants, according to a new book on the Trump family.
“Donald wanted it for her, bad, to the point where he suggested to friends that breast implants might help her along,” author Emily Jane Fox writes in Born Trump, which was released on Tuesday.
President Trump’s sister, Maryanne, was so mortified that she petitioned one of her brother’s friends to talk him out of letting her niece get plastic surgery.
“When his friend confronted him about it, he denied that was getting implants,” Fox writes. “At the end of the call, he asked, ‘Why not, though?’ ”
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Of course, those who have been following Ivanka’s relationship with her father know this is far from the first time he’s made a comment that’s appeared to cross the father/daughter line.
Most famously, during a 2006 appearance on The View, he said that “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
Other times, Donald has raised eyebrows over sexually charged comments he’s made about Ivanka, including during a 2003 interview with Howard Stern in which he said Ivanka had “the best body,” and another Stern sit-down in which he gave the shock jock the okay to call Ivanka a “piece of ass.”
And then there’s comments Donald has made about his younger daughter, Tiffany, now 24 — like in a 1994 episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous when he talked about the attributes Tiffany, then 1, had inherited from him and his second wife, Marla Maples.
“I think that she’s got a lot of Marla, she’s really a beautiful baby,” Trump said.
“She’s got Marla’s legs. We don’t know whether or not she’s got this part yet but time will tell,” he added, holding his hands in front of his chest to represent breasts.
Born Trump explores much of Donald’s relationship with his five children (from three wives) — including the hard-partying college days of eldest son Donald Trump Jr., whose alleged habit of passing out in his college classmates’ rooms and wetting their beds reportedly earned him the nickname “Diaper Don” at the University of Pennsylvania. (A rep for Trump Jr. denies this claim.)
Fox, a senior reporter for Vanity Fair, also describes in the book how Donald allegedly used Ivanka as “a human shield,” citing one anecdote attributed to a friend of the businessman who would be president.
Describing a scene from when Donald had just started dating eventual wife Melania Trump in 1998, the author writes that Donald was “fooling around” in his Trump Tower apartment with another woman, “leaving what he described as a mess of twisted sheets in the bedroom and towels smeared with her makeup in the bathroom.”
When Melania confronted him about the towels, “he told her that Ivanka had come over that day after a modeling shoot. The makeup, he said, was hers. Just ask her,” the book claims.
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As for Ivanka’s aforementioned modeling career, Fox writes that she was “abidingly well-mannered and punctual and grateful for the opportunities.”
There were a few snafus along the way, like when she was asked, at 16, to pose using a vacuum cleaner and “had no idea how to use it.”
Another shoot, at New York City’s Chelsea Pier 59 with photographer Patrick DeMarchelier for a Saks Fifth Avenue catalog, had to be rethought because of Ivanka. Seems the famed shutterbug wanted all his male models to be shirtless and all his female models to be without pants. Problem was, Ivanka allegedly “wasn’t wearing any underwear — a fact she had to reveal to handlers on the set.”
Born Trump is available wherever books are sold.