Kara Young says she's speaking out now after New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote in her new book that, "Trump told [Young] that she had gotten her beauty from her mother and her intelligence 'from her dad, the white side.'"
Kara Young, the former supermodel girlfriend of Donald Trump, is speaking out to Inside Edition’s Deborah Norville.
“Kara, you and I have been friends forever. You have specifically asked me not to talk about your old friendship with Donald Trump. Why are you speaking now?” Norville asked.
“When something’s said for years and years and years, and you never say anything back, that got as frustrating as if I spoke all the time,” Young said.
Back in the 1990s, it was hard to pick up a magazine and not see Young. She was one the original supermodels, appearing in commercials with Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford.
In 1997, Donald Trump, newly divorced from his second wife Marla Maples, asked Young out.
“I didn’t think I was going to like him, because he wasn’t my type. I didn’t think he was my type, but it just ends up happening. I know it’s hard to believe, he’s very funny and he had a really good personality,” Young said.
For 2.5 years, the model and real estate developer were an item in the gossip pages and photographed at the hottest parties. Young says they ended things because “it just ran its course.”
“There was never any enemy or ‘I hate you.’ There was none of that with us,” Young said.
Trump went on to marry Melania and Young married another billionaire — Greek shipping magnate Peter Georgiopoulos.
After Trump was elected, Young, who is biracial, says that her phone would start ringing every time there was a story about him with a racial overtone.
“It was very, very hard at that time not to say things. I was confused like, should I say something? Should I not say something?” Young said.
Young says an anecdote from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s new Trump book “Confidence Man” is what prompted her to speak out now.
“Trump told [Young] that she had gotten her beauty from her mother and her intelligence 'from her dad, the white side,'" Haberman wrote.
Young tells Inside Edition the anecdote is true. “It sounds — when someone says something in jest — are they kidding? I don’t know,” she said.
Young says she corrected Trump after he made the comment.
“It wasn’t a fight or anything like that, it was just more like — ‘No. Don't say that, it’s not funny,’” Young said. “He said ‘I was just joking, I was just kidding. No, I don’t think that.’”
When asked about the public backlash to Trump’s comments stating there were “very fine people on both sides” during the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, Young said, “You don’t have to ask me how someone is. You can see how they are by what they say and the comments they make.”
It’s been six years since she’s spoken to Donald Trump.
“I called to congratulate him for winning president, as one would,” Young said.
Young says that she believes Donald Trump wants to run for president again, but she doesn’t think he should.
She also says whatever Trump decides to do politically, this interview is the first and last time she'll speak publicly about him. Trump did not return Inside Edition’s request for comment.
