Heidi Klum was a guest at Donald Trump’s wedding to Melania Trump in January 2005, at Mar-a-Lago. Most people who know anything about Klum and Trump together know the opposite kind of moment instead, the 2015 interview where he said she was “no longer a 10.” The wedding rarely comes up.
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The Movie Set Where It Started, and What Came After
Klum and Trump were both cast in a 1998 film about the New York nightclub Studio 54. Trump had a brief appearance near the end of the movie. Klum, around the same time she landed the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover that made her a star, was one of several models brought in for smaller parts.
They stayed in the same social circle after that. A magazine party in 2001 put them in the same photographs. Then, in January 2005, Klum was on the guest list when Trump married Melania at Mar-a-Lago. She has said the connection ran through her hairstylist at the time, Ric Pipino, who did Melania’s hair for the ceremony, a detail she gave in a 2026 interview with the German magazine Zeit Magazin.
That detail doesn’t fully line up with the public record. Klum has referred to Pipino as her husband at the time of the wedding, but her divorce from him was finalized in November 2002, more than two years earlier. Whether the two of them simply stayed close enough after the split for the invitation to still make sense is not something Klum has addressed.
By 2008, Klum and Trump appeared together again, this time at the launch of a Trump branded property in New York, with Melania once more beside them. That same year, Klum became a naturalized American citizen, in time to vote for Barack Obama that November. She has described the Trump she knew in that period simply as an entertaining, well known figure in New York.
The Comment That Overshadowed Everything Else
In August 2015, two months into his first presidential campaign, Trump told The New York Times he sometimes goes “a little bit far” when it comes to women, then added: “Heidi Klum. Sadly, she’s no longer a 10.”
Klum answered within days, posting a video of a man in a Trump mask replacing a “10” sign on her shirt with “9.99.” She kept addressing it through the rest of that year. She told Access Hollywood she did not understand why she had been pulled into a presidential race at all. On The Ellen DeGeneres Show that October, she offered her own theory: her age, she had turned 42 that summer, was probably the real reason he had singled her out.
Ten Years Later, in the Same Room Again
Klum and Trump ended up at the same event again on December 5, 2025, when she and comedian Kevin Hart hosted the draw for the 2026 FIFA World Cup at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Trump, attending as a head of state from one of the tournament’s three host nations, received FIFA’s first Peace Prize partway through the ceremony. It was the first time photographers had caught the two of them together since 2015, and entertainment coverage that week brought the old story back up.
By then, Klum’s own work had shifted. She had left the judging panel of America’s Got Talent earlier that year and returned to Project Runway, the show she had originally hosted until 2017. She still hosts Germany’s Next Topmodel in Germany.
What She Actually Said About the Presidency
Klum returned to the subject of Trump several months later, in an interview with Zeit Magazin published in late May 2026, more than a year into his second term. Asked directly what she thought when he won the presidency, she did not bring up the 2015 comment at all.
She compared the job to being a surgeon. A person should not be allowed to operate on someone’s head without years of training first, she said, and the same logic ought to apply to running a country. She pointed to Angela Merkel’s sixteen years as chancellor as the kind of preparation she meant, and noted that America has elected actors as president before.
That isn’t how Klum’s own path went. Her rise to the kind of platform where her opinion of a sitting president makes international news started with a modeling contest on a German television show in 1992, and continued through three decades of simply being famous. The photographs published alongside her Zeit Magazin interview were taken on top of the Empire State Building, in the same city where she met Trump in 1998. Nobody in the room asked her why.
