Bronze statue of Melania Trump in her hometown hacked off on the ankles and stolen | EUROtoday

A bronze statue of First Lady Melania Trump in her Slovenian hometown has been vandalized and stolen.

The statue, unveiled in Sevnica 5 years in the past throughout her husband’s first time period, was hacked off on the ankles earlier than it disappeared Tuesday, Slovakian police stated.

“A theft was reported on May 13, and immediately police officers visited the crime scene and launched an investigation,’ police spokeswoman Alenka Drenik Rangus said.

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The life-size sculpture was created after a previous wooden statue, created by local artist Aleš Župevc, was torched in July 2020. That piece was cut from the trunk of a linden tree, and depicted Melania in a dress similar to her outfit at Trump’s first presidential inauguration in 2017.

Brad Downey, the conceptual artist behind the bronze replacement, is originally from Kentucky. He previously told The Guardian that the replica statue was motivated by “frustrations with the policies of my birth country.”

“On the one hand we have people being held in cages on the US border with Mexico, on the other, in what is to me a clear contradiction, we have a first lady who is the first ever for whom English is not her mother tongue, whose US citizenship was fast-tracked on a visa reserved for immigrants with extraordinary ability,” he stated in 2020. “I felt I could isolate this contradiction and make a portrait of it.”

Melania was born Melanija Knavs in Sevnica, a small city within the foothills of the Alps with a inhabitants of roughly 17,000 individuals. She moved to the U.S within the Nineties pursue a modeling profession, assembly her future husband Donald Trump in 1998.

The statue theft comes days after biographer Michael Wolff claimed that Trump and his spouse had been dwelling in a “separated” marriage, after studies urged she had spent lower than two weeks on the White House because the president’s inauguration.