'You're next,' Melania Trump's former friend warns America after her tell-all memoir

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former friend and adviser of first lady Melania Trump, is warning Americans not to make the same mistake she did.

In her recently released memoir "Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady," Stephanie Winston Wolkoff has made several claims about the United States first family. In a detailed interview with People magazine about her book, she noted that she didn't pay heed to people who were warning her against working for the Trump family, and requested others to not do the same saying "no one will escape the destruction created by these people."

"Most people in the world don't think that Trump would screw them over. Don't make the same mistake I did. Wake up America! You're next," Wolkoff said.

She has known Melania since 2003, prior to her marriage with Donald Trump, and followed her to the White House in 2017 as an unpaid East Wing adviser after helping plan the inaugural events. The high-profile event manager left the 50-year-old's side in 2018 over what she called a scapegoating about the inauguration cost, insisting she was "thrown under the bus" rather than fired.

The first lady's office had announced in 2018 that Wolkoff's contract as an adviser has been terminated, after public filings disclosed that Wolkoff's events firm had received some $26 million, out of which she retained a $480,000 fee. Wolkoff said about her exit from the Oval Office: "Literally a headline destroyed my life and took away everything that I'd ever built. At the end of the day, (the first lady) towed the line. She did not want to step out of line. That's the reality of it."

"All I know is what happened to my $482,000. Other than that, I don't know where the bank account was. I don't even know the bank number. I didn't have a check. I didn't have authority to sign anything. All I did was complain about everything that was illegal," she added.

Wolkoff revealed that she was originally planning to write an op-ed to clear her name in the matter, but after she started writing, she realised she "needed to first literally step all the way back to day one."