Maryanne Trump Barry, judge who was confidante to her brother Donald until she turned on him in 2020 – obituary

Maryanne Trump Barry, who has died aged 86, was a retired federal judge and the oldest sibling of the former US president Donald Trump.

For most of her life Maryanne was considered to be one of her brother’s closest confidantes. In 2008, when she accompanied him on a visit to their mother’s native Isle of Lewis, The New Yorker claimed that Maryanne was “behind her brother in everything he did”, though The Guardian noted that while his sister delighted local reporters with a few words of Gaelic, “Trump spoke of his fame and success as a property magnate and host of the US version of The Apprentice.”

In 2020, however, a series of conversations recorded without Maryanne’s knowledge by her niece Mary Trump (daughter of Fred Trump Jr, Donald’s older brother), were published in The Washington Post. In them Maryanne excoriated Donald as a liar with “no principles”, a phony and a cheat.

Referring to a Fox News interview in which Trump, who was enforcing heavy-handed tactics at the US border with Mexico, with migrant children being torn from their parents, suggested he might put his sister, then a federal judge, on the border to oversee such cases, Maryanne, a convert to Roman Catholicism, accused him of just wanting to appeal to his base: “I mean, my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this... He has no principles. None. None... His goddamned tweets and lying, oh my God! I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy s---. It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

When Mary asked her aunt whether anyone could believe Trump was a self-made man, Maryanne said: “Well, he has had five bankruptcies... anything he did, he says, ‘Look what I’ve done. Aren’t I wonderful?’ And he’s as tight as a duck’s ass.”

The recordings came to light shortly after Mary Trump published her warts-and-all family memoir Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. In advance of publication, family members had tried to block its release, the White House branding it a “book of falsehoods”, and Mary had been questioned about her sources.

“Mary realised members of her family had lied in prior depositions,” her spokesman explained. “Anticipating litigation, she felt it prudent to tape conversations in order to protect herself.” She then passed the tapes to The Washington Post.

Doubts had been expressed about Mary’s assertion that Trump had paid someone else to take the SATs (tests widely used for college admissions in the US) for him to win a place at the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. But in one taped conversation Maryanne seemed to confirm the allegation: “He was a brat. I did his homework for him... I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college... Then he got into the University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.” She named the obliging friend as Joe Shapiro, though Shapiro’s widow and sister denied it.

Maryanne Barry might have had some regrets about speaking so freely to her niece because in February 2019 she retired from the federal bench in the wake of a New York Times investigation of Donald Trump’s tax affairs, aided by Mary Trump, which led to her being investigated on suspicion of dodging gift and estate taxes on property transferred to her and her siblings by Fred Trump, their father, who died in 1999.

The tax authorities initiated a review and a judicial conduct body launched an investigation which was suspended when Maryanne Barry retired.

Maryanne Elizabeth Trump was born on April 5 1937, the oldest and brightest of the five children of Fred Trump Sr and Mary Anne Trump, the Hebrides-born matriarch after whom she was named. Like her younger brother Donald she attended Kew-Forest School near the Trump family home in Queens, New York.

Had she been a boy, she would no doubt have been expected to take over her father’s property empire, but she “knew better even as a child than to even attempt to compete with Donald”. Instead, she turned to the law, taking a BA cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, followed by an MA from Columbia University and a doctor of jurisprudence degree from Hofstra University School of Law.

While Donald Trump gradually took over the reins at his father’s business, Maryanne rose steadily through the legal ranks, becoming for many years the most successful of the Trump clan. In 1974 she was appointed as one of only two women out of 62 lawyers in the office of the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey and in 1983 was chosen by president Ronald Reagan as District Judge for New Jersey.

In 1989 she presided over the trial and conviction of Louis Manna, the Genovese crime family boss accused of plotting to assassinate rival gangster John Gotti, sentencing him to 80 years in prison. (In 2004 the FBI revealed that Manna had also been plotting Maryanne’s murder.) In 1999 President Clinton elevated her to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Although she was said to be a Republican, her appointment by a Democrat president did not go down well with many on the Right. Worse still, she had spoken positively about the benefits of immigration and had ruled in favour of abortion rights. Although her brother, during his first run for president, said she would be a “phenomenal” candidate for the US Supreme Court, he acknowledged that they had “different views a little bit”.

Ironically the New York Times investigation into the Trump family’s tax affairs that prompted her retirement was made possible by papers she filed to the Senate for her confirmation hearings in 1999. They revealed the existence of a “sham company” called All County Building Supply & Maintenance, which Fred Trump Sr was alleged to have used to move millions in cash to his children, avoiding a 55 per cent tax on gifts over a certain value.

At the time of her death Maryanne was estimated by Celebrity Net Worth to have a fortune of around $200 million, of which a substantial amount had been inherited from her father. In 2015 she donated £160,000 to a care home in Stornoway in memory of her mother and the following year gave $4 million to Fairfield University, a Catholic institution, to fund scholarships and endow the university’s Center for Ignatian Spirituality.

In 1960 she married David Desmond. The marriage was dissolved in 1980, and in 1982 she married John Barry, who died in 2000. She is survived by a son from her first marriage.

Maryanne Trump Barry, born April 5 1937, died November 13 2023