Five fast facts about Marla Maples

In an unprecedented spectacle, not one but three wives of Donald Trump were in Washington DC to watch him become the 45th US president earlier this month.

The three wives are first Lady Melania Trump, his Czech-born first wife Ivana and Marla Maples, the mother of his youngest daughter, Tiffany.

Here's what we know about Trump's second wife, Marla:

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Her relationship with Trump was a national scandal

Trump had been married to Ivana for 13 years when rumours began to circulate in 1990 that he was seeing Maples, a 22-year-old aspiring actress and model who quickly earned the nickname the Georgia Peach.

The image of a young blonde starlet seemingly snatching away a billionaire mogul 17 years her senior from his wife and children was prime tabloid fodder and turned the affair into "one of the biggest sex scandals of the 1990s", says the New York Times. A supposed showdown between Ivana and Marla on the ski slopes of Aspen, Colorado, only fanned the flames of media attention.

In 1992, Donald and Ivana divorced. The following year Trump and a pregnant Maples tied the knot in front of 1,500 guests in a lavish ceremony at the New York Plaza hotel.

It was a case of 'opposites attract'

"When I met him, we were definitely from different backgrounds and I think what he liked the most about me was the fact that I was from a small town in Georgia with more simple values," she told the Daily Beast.

However, the relationship quickly went south and half of their six-year marriage was spent in protracted divorce negotiations. After the split was finalised in 1999, Maples told the New York Post the marriage "was built on an illusion".

"I thought that I could change him," she said. "But he won't change."

Her relationship with Ivanka is complicated

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the bitterness of her split with Trump, Maples's relationship with her one-time stepdaughter Ivanka remains strained.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Ivanka "pointedly noted that she is not close" to Maples and that her former stepmother had spent most of her marriage to Trump in California, while Ivanka attended school in Connecticut and later worked in New York.

However, as if in counterpoint, a Throwback Thursday photo uploaded by Maples in January shows her embracing a young Ivanka and Tiffany on the ski slopes in happier times.

She is into health and spirituality

Unlike her ex-husband, who is said to binge on fast food, Maples follows a strict clean living regimen. In an interview with an organic lifestyle magazine Naturally Savvy, Maples revealed that she avoids sugar, gluten and dairy products and rarely eats meat.

Raised as a Southern Baptist, Maples now practises yoga, mindfulness and Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism that was brought to mainstream attention when Madonna became a devotee in the late nineties.

In her podcast, Awakening with Marla, she explores her favourite topics of spirituality, alternative medicine and empowerment.

She is politically liberal

Ahead of the 2000 presidential election, for which Trump considered running as a candidate for the short-lived Reform Party, Maples made her opinion on his suitability for high office crystal clear.

"I will feel it is my duty to tell the American people what he is really like," she told the Daily Telegraph. "But I can't imagine that they would really elect him, would they?"

Seventeen years on, the supposedly unthinkable has happened – but Maples has kept shtum, apparently from a fear of sabotaging her daughter Tiffany's tentative reconciliation with her father, who was largely absent during her childhood.

"It's just such a hard thing to say because I just do not want to – I never want to get in the middle with Tiffany," she told the Daily Beast, adding: "I have always been more liberal and I believe in gay and lesbian rights and I believe everyone on this planet has a right to choice."