Today, Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s older sister, passed away at age 86, as reported by outlets such as CNN and The New York Times. The former federal judge was found dead on November 13th at her Upper East Side home in Manhattan, according to the New York newspaper, citing sources close to the deceased.
As reported by NBC, Maryanne was receiving palliative care at her residence in New York. The specific cause of her death remains unconfirmed, with expectations that the Medical Examiner’s Office will determine the reasons.
There has been no official statement so far regarding the former judge’s death, and none of her nephews and nieces from the former president, Ivanka, Donald, Eric, or Tiffany, have made any reference to their aunt’s passing on their social media.
Maryanne was appointed in 1983 by then-President Ronald Reagan as a judge for the District of New Jersey. Later, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 1999. Barry ultimately retired in 2019, ending a civil misconduct investigation that was opened after The New York Times accused the then-president and his siblings of alleged tax fraud.
Her differences with Donald Trump, her brother
Despite never publicly addressing differences with her famous brother, Maryanne’s private conversations with her niece, Mary Trump, were revealed in 2020 by The Washington Post. In the audio excerpts obtained without her consent, Barry harshly criticized the then-President of the United States.
“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” she said in the recordings. “He has no principles. None. His damn tweets and lying, oh my God,” she remarked. “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and the cruelty. Donald is cruel,” she added.
The recordings were secretly made by Mary Trump, the daughter of Fred Trump Jr. and Linda Clapp, who published a memoir that same year discussing the “toxic family” in which the then-president grew up.