Maryanne Trump Barry, a former federal judge and older sister of Donald J. Trump who acted as a guardian and critic throughout his life, has passed away. 86 years old. According to three sources, she passed away at her Upper East Side apartment. The police were called to the house early on Monday morning, according to two of the residents.
Nobody mentioned a reason, and everyone who talked did so anonymously. Mr. Trump’s spokesperson did not return a call seeking comment. Mr. Trump’s fixer, the lawyer Roy M. Cohn, is credited with helping Judge Barry get appointed to the federal court in New Jersey during the Reagan administration.
She left her position in 2019 after becoming the center of a judicial probe into the Trump family’s tax procedures, which stemmed from an investigation by The New York Times. According to those close to him, Mr. Trump paid special attention to the advice of his eldest sister.
In the final year of his presidency, however, their relationship suffered a serious rift when the president’s niece, Mary L. Trump, released tapes of her aunt speaking brutally about the president while promoting a memoir about their family. In 1983, President Reagan appointed Judge Barry, a Republican, to the District Court in New Jersey.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. John J. Barry was a seasoned New Jersey trial and appellate attorney, and she was his widow. After The New York Times revealed that the Trump family had used questionable tax strategies in the 1990s to grow Mr. Trump’s and his siblings’ inherited riches, she resigned from the bench.
The Times concluded that Judge Barry not only personally profited from most of these schemes, but was also in a position to influence the decisions made by her family. Two years before to it, she had been marked as an inactive senior judge. Since retired judges are not subject to judicial behavior regulations, the investigation into the court was rendered moot by her retirement.
When Mary Trump was researching and writing her book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” (2020), she secretly taped a series of audio recordings in which Judge Barry made harsh statements about her brother. Critiques on the audiotapes provided to The Washington Post went further than those included in Ms. Trump’s book.
“His goddamned tweet and the lying — oh, my God,” Judge Barry said in one of the recordings. “I’m talking too freely, but, you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying.” At another point she said: “All he wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles. None.” She added: “It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.” “You can’t trust him,” she said.
Mary Trump sued the president and his siblings in 2020 for allegedly stealing her inheritance. She stated the Trumps’ “fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life.” According to the White House’s response, Ms. Trump’s accusations are motivated by her own agenda.
Mr. Trump, 77, who is leading the Republican presidential primary race while facing dozens of criminal allegations in four cases, has suffered several personal losses over the past few years. In 2020, the president hosted a funeral for his younger brother, Robert, who had passed away. His first wife, Ivana Trump, died last year. Fred Jr., another sibling, passed away in 1981 at the age of 43.
The senior Trump sibling was Judge Barry Trump. Maryanne Elizabeth Trump, granddaughter of German immigrants, was born to Fred and Mary (McLeod) Trump on April 5, 1937, in New York City. Her father, a real estate tycoon and the family’s main source of income, built thousands of units in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. Her mom was a migrant worker from Scotland.
The family lived in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens. Judge Barry once recalled: “The first time I realized my father was successful was when I was 15 and a friend said to me, ‘Your father is rich.’ We were privileged but I didn’t know it.” She attended the elite Kew-Forest School in Queens and graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1958.
She attended Columbia University, where she received a master’s degree in public law and government in 1962. After staying at home for 13 years, she decided to go back to school and became the editor of the law review at Hofstra University on Long Island. After earning her degree in 1974, she began working as an assistant federal prosecutor in New Jersey for the federal government.
She served as first assistant U.S. attorney from 1981 to 1983, making her one of the few female federal prosecutors at the time to hold such a high position. After marrying David Desmond in 1960, she and him eventually got a divorce in 1980. They tied the knot in 1982. In the year 2000, he passed away.
Her immediate family consists of her brother, David, a younger sister, Elizabeth Trump Grau, and a son, David William Desmond, from her first marriage. She has a reputation for being a strict judge. Two detectives suspected of shielding a drug dealer had a plea deal rejected by Judge Barry, resulting in their trial and conviction.
She sided with a Gambian asylum seeker and criticized the judge who had initially raised doubts about his case. The judge was eventually replaced. In 2000, Judge Barry penned the majority opinion in an appeals court judgment that overturned a New Jersey restriction on late-term abortions on the grounds that the law violated a woman’s right to privacy in medical decision making because of its ambiguity.
As severe as she was on the bench, Judge Barry urged that women lighten up just a touch on the topic of sexual harassment. “I stand second to none in condemning sexual harassment of women,” she told the Interagency Committee on Women in Law Enforcement in 1992.
“But what is happening is that every sexy joke of long ago, every flirtation, is being recalled by some women and revised and re-evaluated as sexual harassment. Many of these accusations are, in anybody’s book, frivolous.” Judge Barry received an award from the Seton Hall University School of Law in 2004 that was handed to her by then-Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
When accepting the prize, Judge Barry urged other women to remember the challenges faced by Justice O’Connor and other pioneering female judges. She got excellent honors in college but ended up working as a legal secretary. Think about how far we’ve come.
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