Is an archived page of a Melania Trump profile on "A Foreign Affair" mail-order bride website from 1996 real? No, that's not true: The purported page was never archived on the Wayback Machine servers, Internet Archive director Mark Graham told Lead Stories. "What you see is a doctored image," he said. An analysis done with help from the Wayback Machine's support team concluded the fake page was likely created in 2016 using a real profile page of a Russian woman that was archived.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on @bekahdayyy TikTok account on November 8, 2025. The video transcript opened:
So, this is a snapshot from a 1996 archive of a website called a foreign affair. As you can see, Melania is on this website, and she has her date of birth, her background. There's her photos from her modeling I think she was like 17 in those photos. If you look down here, it says that the website is called a foreign affair, and this was copyright 1996 foreign affair is a real matchmaking, international dating mail order bride company that exists that is based in the United States, that was founded in 1995 and still operates to this day, from the Internet Archive. This was 1996, the year after a foreign affair had already started. So Melania was on the website a year after it was founded.
This is what the fake archived page looked like:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon Dec 29 16:05:26 2025 UTC)
This is what the image of the purported archived page looked like as shown in the video:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of politicsforum.org)
The video narration continued:
Like when I say they're still active and operating to this day, you can look at their social medias. They're actively still posting, showing off their happy couples, showing off the brides they have available. Like, this is weird and like, I'm not being a hater on, like, international dating, but under these pretenses, in this context, yeah, this is just like, mail-order bride stuff, international marriage broker, romance tour company, be for real. Just take a look see at the countries in which they operate. All right, so, yeah, we need to protect the way back machine at all costs, because the evidence is there. You know, this isn't shocking, and I know that, like, these people lie intentionally, and they lie by omission all the time, especially when they're talking about, like, their backgrounds, but it is pretty crazy that, like, there's evidence that she was a mail order bride, and Michael Wolff might just prove it in a court of law.
The first known sighting of the faked archive page was on a chat forum thread titled "Is Trump's Wife a Mail Order Bride?" (archived here) posted during Donald Trump's first presidential campaign on September 24, 2016, according to an analysis done with support from team members of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Someone using the name Lawrence McDonald started the PoliticsForum.org thread on September 23, 2016, with the claim that Donald Trump did not meet Melania Knauss at a fashion week party in 1998, as he had said:
But Anna Novak a matchmaker who operated an office in Slovenia for several "Mail Order Bride" companies, including a company called A Foreign Affair, says she received a call sometime around 1995 from the head office to help arrange a call between a female member Melanija, and A VIP client she only knew as Donald. Shortly after the call, Melanija asked to be removed as a member and to have her profile completely removed from the websites.
McDonald posted the image of the fake archived page the next day with this introduction:
Well, it took me several days and a lot of code writing to sift through the millions of achieved pages on the Wayback Machine achieves [sic]. Was about to give up when a colleague gave me mining script to look at all archived pages whether displayed or not. And lord and behold jackpot, here she is!
The Wayback Machine access logs for September 24, 2016, do show someone was searching for the URL shown in the image -- http://loveme.com/foreign-affair/infopage/info1607.htm -- but the search returned a 404 error code that indicated the page did not exist, the analysis found. The Wayback Machine, however, did archive a real loveme.com profile for another woman -- Natalya from Russia.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of archive.org)
A comparison of the real archive page and the fake archive page revealed that many of the specific details about the Russian woman were copied in the fake Melania profile.
Natalya's weight, height, measurements are identical in the Melania profile. The details about marital status, children, pets, religion, smoking, and drinking are also the same. Both profiles list the same sport -- swimming.
Natalya's self-description reads:
"I am cheerful, steady, faithful, trim, a little romantic. I am presently a University student and I am studying English and hope to become an interpreter. I enjoy music (I play piano & guitar)."
Melania's response is nearly identical:
"I am cheerful, steady, faithful, trim, a little romantic. I am presently a University student and I am studying English and working as a model. I enjoy music and traveling."
Natalya's "perfect mate" comment section reads:
"I want to find a sincere, honest, and loving man to create a family and share my life, to love and respect forever."
Melania's response is identical:
"I want to find a sincere, honest, and loving man to create a family and share my life, to love and respect forever."
The fake Melania profile correctly listed her date of birth as April 26, 1970, but the age listed was 21. The future first lady would have been 26 in 1996.
The photo in the fake Melania profile is real. It was taken when she was about 17 years old in the early days of her modeling career.
