Mary Trump’s SAT allegation refuted by widow of President Trump’s pal
Ex-tennis star Pam Shriver pushed back against the explosive allegation in a tell-all memoir by President Trump’s niece that he had hired pal Joe Shapiro — the former pro’s late husband — to take the SATs for him.
Mary Trump wrote in “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” that Trump enlisted the help of Shapiro to take the exam so he could get the scores needed to transfer from Fordham to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
“To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker to take his SATs for him,” Mary Trump wrote in her upcoming book, ABC News reported.
“That was much easier to pull on in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well,” she wrote without providing proof or attribution.
Shapiro, an attorney and a former executive at the Walt Disney Co., died in 1999 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to ABC News.
Shriver, now an ESPN tennis analyst, said that if the book refers to her late husband, who was Trump’s friend, she is confident the allegation is false.
“My late husband Joe Shapiro passed away 21 years ago. He was a man of great integrity, honesty; he was a hard worker. He was literally the smartest person I ever met,” Shriver said in a video posted on Twitter.
She said the two men did not meet until after Trump had transferred to the prestigious Wharton for his junior year, when Shapiro was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania.
“He went to University of Pennsylvania, member of the class of 1968. It was while he was at University of Pennsylvania where he met Donald Trump. They became friends; they loved the sport of golf. They shared the same hometown of New York City; they shared the same campus. They stayed in a little bit of touch through the years.”
Shriver added: “But obviously Joe’s not here to defend himself and say what happened, but I just want to recollect what he told me about where he met Mr. Trump. And I want to thank all of Joe’s close friends and his sister Beth for our talks in the past 24 hours about what an upstanding, outstanding man Joe Shapiro was.”
Shriver said Shapiro and Trump remained friends over the years — and that they visited him a few times at Trump Tower, ABC News reported.
“When you put somebody’s name in print in a book, you want to make sure the facts around it are correct, especially if they are not living because it’s not like Joe is here and he would have known how to deal with this,” she said, according to the news outlet.
Shriver added that she had already refuted the allegation when a reporter asked her about it years ago.
“It feels unfair,” she said, according to ABC News.
Shriver said she has seen Trump at tennis events over the years and that he always said that “Joe Shapiro was the smartest man I ever met.”
On Tuesday, the White House forcefully denied the allegation by Mary Trump, the daughter of the president’s late elder brother, Fred Trump Jr.
“The absurd SAT allegation is completely false,” it said in a statement.
Publisher Simon & Schuster, which said the book would hit the shelves on July 14, two weeks ahead of schedule, said in a statement Monday that it stands by its contents.
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