Laura Benanti, the actor who, for a decade, mockingly portrayed first lady Melania Trump on Stephen Colbert’s now-defunct “Late Show,” has revealed the terrifying fallout from the threats she says she faced from supporters of Donald Trump over her impression.
“I had to move. I had to literally move,” she revealed on the latest episode of “The Downside with Gianmarco Soresi” podcast.
“Somebody doxed me,” she recalled. “This right-wing psychopath sent an email blast to all of his people, being like, ‘Hey.’ Not only was it my impression, but things I had said and political organizations I was a part of, and he was like, ‘Let her know what you think of her.’ And then put my fucking address.”
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Benanti said someone photographed her walking her young daughter, who was around 2 years old at the time, to school.
“It was so scary,” she said of the incident, which occurred shortly before the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020, and which she said she only discovered by chance because her driver “was MAGA” and received the email himself.
“He was so upset that they would do this, and I was like, ‘This is what I’m talking about!’” she recalled. “He texted me, and he was like, ‘This is what’s going on,’ and ‘What are we going to do?’ And I was like, ‘You tell me. These are your people!’”
Benanti said the ordeal forced her family to leave the apartment they owned and move into a rental. “We were paying fucking rent and a mortgage,” she said.
Despite the threats, Benanti said she ultimately decided not to stop portraying Melania Trump.
“There was a period of time where we all sort of were like, maybe we don’t do it for a little while, and then it just felt like I was being a coward and I do think, in some ways, political satire is a public service,” she said. “I can’t tell you the amount of people who come up to me who are like, ‘Thank you, I need that.’”