“It was a bit of shock when I met her,” he told ABC. “She is very special, that’s the truth.”

In 2000, they unexpectedly bumped into each other in New York, and Melania greeted her former flame in English.

“I asked her: Did you forget that you are Slovenian?” he recalled. She told him she was living between New York and Florida and that “she would never go back to Slovenia.”

Of her eventual marriage to Donald, Zorcic mused: “I think her marriage to Trump was fate. Nobody believed 20 years ago that she would live at the top of the world, on Fifth Avenue in Trump Tower – even her!”