A former friend and adviser of Melania Trump says it was "the worst mistake of my life" to work for President Donald Trump and his family.
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Stephanie Winston Wolkoff was an unpaid White House adviser to the first lady until February 2018, when her contract was terminated as questions arose about costs for the presidential inauguration she helped produce.
"When it really counted, Melania wasn't there for me," Wolkoff writes in Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady, to be published Tuesday.
"She wasn't really my friend. In fact, I wish I had never met her," Wolkoff says about the first lady, a former fashion model.
Wolkoff, a New York-based event planner, said the pair met in 2003 in the hallways of Vogue magazine, where Wolkoff worked.
Stephanie Grisham, a spokesperson for Mrs Trump, blasted the book in a statement as "full of mistruths and paranoia" based on an "imagined need for revenge".
Wolkoff also writes about frostiness between the first lady and president's eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump.
She said she and the first lady both once "bellied over with laughter" after Mrs Trump referred to Ivanka - long seen as her father's favourite child - as "Princess".
Wolkoff also detailed how they launched Operation Block Ivanka to keep her from being too prominently featured in inauguration day photographs of her father being sworn in to office.
Ivanka Trump declined comment Monday. A person close to her said it's traditional for a president's children to join in such a historic occasion.
Wolkoff devotes two of the book's 11 chapters to planning for the January 2017 inauguration, describing the committee responsible for raising money to pay for several days of events as beset with organisational and communications issues that complicated her work.
She says she repeatedly raised questions about spending but she eventually came to be viewed as the problem.
Trump's Presidential Inaugural Committee raised nearly $US107 million ($A145 million) for the lavish event, an unprecedented inaugural price tag nearly twice that of President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009.
"Like a broken record, I kept expressing my concerns about budgets," Wolkoff wrote.
"Also like a broken record, I became everyone's problem."
Australian Associated Press
