Famed magazine editor Tina Brown is opening up about President Donald Trump’s past, and it got messy.
She sat down for an interview with Tony Dokoupil for “CBS Sunday Morning” where she talked about her career — and her working relationship with Trump before he became president.
With decades of experience in media that includes stints editing the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, Brown was on the scene during Trump’s New York City heyday. In one story she shared with CBS, she said that Trump once poured wine down the dress of a reporter after she wrote a story that enraged him.
“One of our best writers did a piece on him, and she noted in the piece that he had Hitler’s speeches in his office. And he went absolutely ballistic,” said Brown.
Brown didn’t name the reporter, but a 1990 piece in Vanity Fair by author Marie Brenner fits the bill. In the story, Brenner described the awkward moment of the Hitler speeches:
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
A representative for Brenner did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
The interview will air on Nov. 12 at 9/8c on “CBS Sunday Morning.”