Melania Trump book reveals nude photo suspicions and claim first lady and president sleep on different floors

Free, Melania also sheds new light on first lady's alleged plagiarism of speech by Michelle Obama

Melania Trump suspects Roger Stone, her husband’s longtime ally and former adviser, of leaking nude photos from her modelling past, a new book will claim.

But the first lady “still refuses to believe” the US president had any involvement in the release of the pictures, according to Free, Melania, written by CNN correspondent Kate Bennett.

The images, taken during a 1996 photoshoot and published the next year in a French men’s magazine, resurfaced in the New York Post during the 2016 US presidential election campaign. At the time, Mr Trump was embroiled in a high-profile row with the family of Humayun Khan, a US soldier killed in Iraq.

“The theory goes … that Trump was trying to head off a bad week on the campaign,” Ms Bennett writes in the book, seen in advance of publication by The Guardian.

Mr Stone had no formal role with the Trump campaign at the time but remained close to the Republican candidate, who is known for his apparent attempts to distract the media from negative stories.

The Independent has approached Mr Stone and the White House for comment but neither had responded at the time of publication.

Mr Stone is facing prison after being convicted last month of obstruction, witness tampering, and lying to congress about his contact with Wikileaks during the presidential campaign.

Ms Bennett’s book also sheds new light on the Trumps’ living quarters in the White House, where it has previously been reported the couple have separate bedrooms.

According to an edited extract from Free, Melania published by CNN, the first lady “prefers her own large, private space in a suite of rooms on a separate floor”.

Ms Trump reportedly has a two-room private chamber formerly occupied by Michelle Obama’s mother, as well as a “glam room” where she does her hair and make-up and a private gym.

Ms Bennett paints Ms Trump as “powerful and influential” in the White House, often weighing in on her husband’s decisions “both politically and in the way he manages his staff”.

“She has frequent, opinionated discussions with him, oftentimes more than once a day, via telephone,” the author writes.

But the first lady has also been “let down” by her husband’s appointment of “a skeleton staff of political neophytes”, the book argues, blaming Ms Trump’s aides for a 2016 speech which appeared to be plagiarised from a talk given by her predecessor Michelle Obama.

Ms Trump was “beside herself with guilt” following the speech she gave at the Republican National Convention which contained glaring similarities to Ms Obama’s address eight years earlier, Ms Bennett said.

The first lady’s speechwriter was a “Trump Organisation staffer hardly versed in the ways of political campaign speeches,” she added, and Ms Trump “felt she had let down her husband on what should have been her most triumphant speaking engagement to date”.

The book also suggests there is tension between Ms Trump and her husband’s daughter Ivanka, describing “cracks in the facade of the sunny ties between the two women closest and most influential to the president”.

“The unprecedented nature of a first daughter involved in some of the similar activities usually relegated to a first lady has caused drama,” writes Ms Bennett, who covers the first lady and the Trump family in her role for CNN.

The White House has criticised the book, which it claimed contained “many false details and opinions”.