Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s eldest sister and a former federal judge, was found dead in her New York City home early Monday morning, The New York Times and ABC News reported. She was 86.
Authorities did not release a cause of death, but ABC cited sources who said first responders were sent to her Fifth Avenue home around 4 a.m. after they received a call about someone in cardiac arrest. There were reportedly no signs of trauma or foul play.
Citing a source, the community news website The Daily Voice reported that Barry had cancer and had been receiving hospice care. The office of New York City’s medical examiner did not respond to an inquiry from The Daily Beast.
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Trump, 77, had yet to make a public statement by Monday afternoon.
Barry was both a protector and critic of her younger brother, most recently making headlines in 2020 when a recording went viral of her disparaging her brother and his supporters for having “no principles.”
That recording was leaked by Barry’s niece, Mary Trump, who—in addition to suing Barry and the former president for allegedly scheming to keep her from her full inheritance—published a scathing book that exposed the financial underbelly of the Trump family.
Barry is the third of Trump’s four siblings to die. His youngest brother, Robert Trump, died in 2020 at 71. Fred Trump Jr. died after a heart attack in 1981 when he was 42. Trump’s only living sibling is Elizabeth Trump Grau, who is 81.
Barry was a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit until 2019, when she retired amid a judicial conduct inquiry into her alleged involvement in possible tax fraud for her family.
She was first appointed to the bench in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. President Bill Clinton appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1999.
Barry’s first husband was David Desmond, with whom she had her only child. They split in 1980 and, two years later, she married John Barry, a trial and appellate lawyer. They remained together until he died in 2000 at 60.
Despite her occasional harsh words for her brother, sources told the Times that Trump would heed the words of his sister more than most in his inner circle—though it’s unclear if the leaked recording of Barry put a strain on their relationship.
“He has no principles. None. None,” she said of Trump in the tape, which was recorded in 2018 as he oversaw a policy that separated migrant children from their parents at the southern border. “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
