Melania Trump's website disappears completely after questions emerge about college degree

Melania Trump's official online biography has disappeared after questions surfaced about whether she had earned a college degree. Photo / AP

Melania Trump could soon be America's first lady, leveraging power of the White House's East Wing to manicure her public image. But for now, she no longer has a website to call her own.

MelaniaTrump.com went dark sometime Wednesday morning, redirecting visitors to Trump.com, the family business's main brand portal.

"The website in question was created in 2012 and has been removed because it does not accurately reflect my current business and professional interests," Mrs. Trump wrote Thursday on Facebook.

But speculation has focused on questions about a line in her now-dormant online biography that appears to have inflated her academic credentials.

The Trump campaign did not respond to emails, but Mrs. Trump's statement appeared online shortly after DailyMail.com asked a spokesperson for comment.

"At the age of eighteen, she signed with a modeling agency in Milan," the bio read until yesterday. "After obtaining a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia, Melania was jetting between photo shoots in Paris and Milan, finally settling in New York in 1996."

It appears, however, that she left college after a single year when she caught the modeling bug.

Bojan Pozar and Igor Omerza, a pair of Slovenian journalists who published a biography of Donald Trump's third wife, wrote that the then-named Melanija Knavs spent one year at the the University of Ljubljana's architecture school.

From there, they wrote, she "became - and remained - a college dropout."

"In her freshman year, the 19-year old Melanija Knavs attended lectures on the following subjects: elements of architecture, fine arts, fundamentals of technical mechanics, architectural construction, descriptive geometry, mathematics, and an ideological (read "communist') elective credit called "General Partisan Resistance and Social Self-protection",' they wrote.

The book, Melania Trump - The Inside Story: From a Slovenian Communist Village to the White House, was published in February.

The Huffington Post focused its anti-Trump guns on the billionaire's wife after last week's brief kerfuffle over lines in Melania's Republican National Convention speech that were lifted - without her knowledge - from a 2008 Michelle Obama speech.

Along with the contested biography, Mrs. Trump's website included pitches for her caviar-infused line of skin care products and her ladies watches and jewelry - along with three dozen images of magazine covers and other photo spreads featuring her fashion poses.

The product promotions are likely the "business and professional interests" that Mrs. Trump said Thursday are no longer active.

The shuttering of Melania's website means there is no longer an official, sanctioned biography of the would-be future first lady.

Trump.com includes biographical sketches of Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump, the businessman's three eldest adult children.

But as of Thursday afternoon, his campaign is not offering an outline of Melania's life story that it stands behind.