I Was Bestfriends With Ivanka Trump

When she became classmates with the future president’s daughter at age 12, Lysandra Ohrstrom’s life rocketed into a whirlwind of limo rides and shopping trips. But after more than a decade as inseparable besties, the ideological cracks turned into chasms

Ivanka Trump was my best friend growing up. We first met when I joined her seventh-grade class at Chapin, an all-girls school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that had a reputation for attracting blue blood, feminine, but an ambitious cohort of young girls, not unlike its most famous alumna, Jackie O. After spending the previous four years in social isolation in the suburbs, I was eager to land on the popular side of the classroom, ruled over by Ivanka and about five other wild, entitled precocious preteens. It was the grunge era, so we moshed around the classroom in performative angst, wearing our uniforms of green plaid kilts (tailored shorter the more popular you got) and stacked-heel Steve Madden loafers as the dystopian wails of Nirvana blared from a boom box.

The scene was anything but grungy, of course, especially among Ivanka’s cohort, most of whom lived in palatial townhouses or duplexes and retired to equally palatial country houses for the weekend.

Ivanka and I hung out occasionally at first. I got a last-minute invite to her 13th birthday party, where about 15 of us caravanned to Atlantic City in a trio of limos and camped out in the penthouse suite of the Taj Mahal for the weekend under the supervision of two wary members of her dad’s security team. She called me to pose in a photo spread for Sassy magazine because none of her usual group was available. I remember swinging by her dad’s office at Trump Tower so she could borrow his credit card to go shopping.