A Trump campaign spokesman is defending the photos after they were splashed on the cover of the New York Post.
Nude photos of a 25-year-old Melania Trump have emerged and her husband's campaign are standing behind the scandalous images.
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The photos were taken for a now-defunct French men's magazine, Max, 20 years ago when she was modeling.
It was just three years before she met her future husband, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, defended the racy photos, telling CNN: "There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. She’s a beautiful woman."
In some of the photos, Melania, who at the time went by the name Melania K., posed nude with another woman, Scandinavian model Emma Eriksson.
The French photographer who took the photos, Jarl Ale de Basseville, told the New York Post: “This is beauty and not porn. I am always shocked by the porn industry because they are destroying the emotion and the essence of purity and simplicity.”
He snapped the photos in New York in the mid-90s inside an apartment in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.
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Kate Anderson Brower, author of First Women, The Grace And Power Of America's Modern First Ladies, told Inside Edition: "You don't expect a first lady to have this kind of photoshoot in their past. It is something we have never seen before. It is uncharted territory."
Melania, 46, met Donald Trump at a party in 1998 in New York. They married in 2005 and have one child together, Barron, 10.
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