Mary Trump, the president’s niece, claims in a book due for release this month that President Donald Trump paid his friend Joe Shapiro to take the exam for him.
“To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well,” Mary Trump wrote.
But the widow of Joe Shapiro said the claim he helped Trump take an SAT exam when he was in high school isn’t true.
Pam Shriver, Joe Shapiro’s widow, said her late husband, who passed away 21 years ago, met Donald Trump at the University of Pennsylvania.
That would have been after the SAT exam took place. SATs are taken by high school students in their senior year.
Shriver said in a video statement that her late husband and Trump bonded over a shared love of golf and both being from New York City.
“Obviously Joe’s not here to defend himself and say what happened, but I just want to recollect what he told me about where he met Mr. Trump,” Shriver said. “And I want to thank all of Joe’s close friends and his sister Beth for our talks in the past 24 hours about what an upstanding, outstanding man Joe Shapiro was.”
Shriver also shared a message about defending the honor of loved ones who pass away.
Shriver, a tennis analyst and former professional tennis player, said that her late husband was “a man of great integrity, honesty, he was a hard worker.”
“He always did the right thing, and that’s why this hurts,” Shriver added to ABC News.
“When you put somebody’s name in print in a book, you want to make sure the facts around it are correct, especially if they are not living because it’s not like Joe is here and he would have known how to deal with this,” she said.
Simon & Schuster, which is publishing Mary Trump’s book, said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times: “We stand behind the author and the contents of the book.”
The White House in a statement said: “The absurd SAT allegation is completely false.”
Alice Frankston, a friend of Mary Trump, said during an appearance on CNN on Wednesday that Shriver’s late husband is not the Joe Shapiro mentioned in the book.
“Joe Shapiro’s a really common name on the East Coast,” Frankston said, adding that Mary Trump stands by her allegation.
The book, titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” is slated for a July 14 release.
